Magnetic core memory stores data in a computer using tiny magnetized rings, or cores, threaded onto a grid of fine wires, with the direction of each core's magnetic field representing a single bit of information. Physicist An Wang and engineer Way-Dong Woo devised a working core-memory scheme in 1949, and Jay Forrester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led its development into a practical, dense random-access memory, used in the Whirlwind computer in the early 1950s. Core memory became the dominant computer memory technology through the 1960s and into the 1970s, before cheaper and denser semiconductor memory chips superseded it.
Facts
SignificancePredominant form of computer random-access memory for roughly twenty years, from 1955 to 1975. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Magnetic-core memory
History section, Wang and Woo
Substantial work in the field was carried out by the Shanghai-born American physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo, who created the pulse transfer controlling device in 1949.
Lead section, second sentence
It predominated for roughly 20 years between 1955 and 1975, and is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
- In Group: Computer Data Storage Devices and Media, In computing, magnetic-core memory is a form of random-access memory.
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