imitation game movie

[Jon Elson]

On 02/10/2015 10:22 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 02/10/2015 07:52 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
>
>> 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?
Well, I think his inventions came just a bit later, and sure 
made their mark on
ALL areas of electronics, not just computers.
>
> 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