10 Feb
2015
10 Feb
'15
9:56 p.m.
On 02/10/2015 10:22 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 02/10/2015 07:52 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
Well, I think his inventions came
just a bit later, and sure
made their mark on
ALL areas of electronics, not just computers.
Now, my freshman adviser at Washington University
was
William Papian,
the grad student who worked with Jay Forrester on
coincident current
core memory! Wow, talk about something that REALLY
affected the
development of computers!
Any more so, than, say, William Gardner Pfann?
The point is that I believe that inventions have their
"time", wherein a bunch of seemingly unrelated discoveries
come to incubate a great leap forward in knowledge.
Oh, absolutely! There was a lot of work on using ferrite
rings as storage
and logic elements at that time, but Forrester and Papian really
extended what had been done before, and the coincident current
scheme was really ELEGANT and made large arrays of fast memory
practical. The bigger you built the array, the more memory
you got
with small increments in the number of drivers.
But, yes, if they hadn't invented it, somebody else would
have had the
same idea within a relatively short time, I'll bet.
Jon