17 Jul
2007
17 Jul
'07
12:05 a.m.
Jim Battle wrote:
After reading this chapter, it disabused me of the meme that Wang
invented core memory. Others had proposed using magnetic rings before
Wang. IBM even had done some experimenting with them before hearing of
Wang's results at Harvard, which were far more advanced than what IBM
had done to that point.
(1) like many inventions, there wasn't a
single father,
rather a concurrent development by many parties that
were sometimes aware of the work of the others,
sometimes not
I've long been critical/skeptical of that general attribution to Wang. While
Wang can be said to have made contributions to the development of core memory,
there were several ideas, as you suggest, that had to come together to produce
a practical computer memory. I'm still of the understanding that the
Forrester/Whirlwind developments produced the first practical random-access
core memory of the 3D 4-wire form, the form which would be the standard for
many years (and which would be why IBM had to pay MIT the bigger bucks). (It
would be interesting to know when the 3-wire form/improvement was developed).