Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time.
1951: Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.
In stepped a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Led by professor Jay Forrester, the researchers developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind.
The structure consisted of a plane made of wires and magnetic rings called cores. Each ring contained one bit of data. Every bit on the memory plane could be accessed with a single read-and-write cycle.
In short, magnetic core memory was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed. The time it took to request and retrieve information from memory was a microsecond — hundreds of thousands of times slower than memory today, but nonetheless a magnificent achievement in the 1950s.
“When we were working on this, in a million years we couldn’t imagine what would happen with memory,” said Bernard Widrow, who worked on Project Whirlwind with Forrester, in a 2009 interview with Edison Tech Center.
Forrester applied for a patent on his invention May 11, 1951. Project Whirlwind stayed active until 1959, though the technology was never used for a flight simulator.
Source: Today in Technology History; Edison Tech Center
Photo: Magnetic core memory removed from an Olympia 15-digit Nixie calculator.
Synx508/Flickr
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