Forrester: Core Memory

A brilliant, eminent, and controversial gentleman, and one to whom I owe a vast debt of gratitude. This portrait, cadged from MIT’s centennial yearbook, shows him a few years younger than I remember. Good photo: lacks only the little five-inch cube of tiny wired-up ferrite donuts that he kept on that desk. In 1947, you see, he invented core memory and came later to hold the patent for it. That cube, if I recall cor(e)rectly, or one like it, would give a computer one kilobyte (1,024 characters)¹ of random-access memory. Google him, if you doubt me. What with his patents, he didn’t need to teach to earn his living, but he was good at it, and he had something important to say.

¹My iPhone holds 8GB (over 8 billion characters) of RAM. It’s no longer state-of-the-art…

Ed.D

1967-68:

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