Magnetic Core Memory

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computer memory technology through the 1960s and into the 1970s, before cheaper and denser semiconductor memory chips superseded it.