Jay Wright Forrester
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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 i
Project Whirlwind core memory, circa 1951
Magnetic-core memory
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In computing, magnetic-core memory is a form of random-access memory. It predominated for roughly 20 years between 1955 and 1975, and is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
Jay Wright Forrester
…to Gordon S. Brown. After the war he headed MIT's Whirlwind project, one of the first digital computers. There he is credited as a co-inventor of magnetic core memory, the predominant form of random-access computer memory during the most explosive years of digital computer development (between 1955 and 1975). It was…
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.
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