Jay Wright Forrester
Videos
Page
Jay Wright Forrester was an American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist. He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989.
Project Whirlwind core memory, circa 1951
Magnetic-core memory
Videos
Page
Magnetic-core memory is a form of random-access computer memory. It predominated for roughly 20 years between 1955 and 1975, and is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
A 32 × 32 core memory plane storing 1024 bits (or 128 bytes) of data. The small black rings at the intersections of the grid wires, organised in four squares, are the ferrite cores.
Project Whirlwind core memory
Close-up of a core plane. The distance between the rings is roughly 1 mm (0.04 in). The green horizontal wires are X; the Y wires are dull brown and vertical, toward the back. The sense wires are diagonal, colored orange, and the inhibit wires are vertical twisted pairs.
One of three inter-connected modules that make up an Omnibus-based (PDP 8/e/f/m) PDP-8 core memory plane.