The same day, 1951, the birth of RAM

On May 11, 1951, Jay Forrester sent his description of the memory core matrix to the US patent office. This day can be considered the birthday of RAM-memory.

During the time when computers occupied entire rooms and weighed hundreds of kilograms, the memory of the then computers relied on cathode rays as a source of information. However, the US military needed a more powerful machine, primarily capable of calculating flight simulations in real time. Not surprisingly, the technology has allowed to increase power, out of the door of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Forrester was a professor at MIT, who, together with his team, led the development of a three-dimensional magnetic structure, codenamed Project Whirlwind ( Project Whirlwind ). What you see in the picture above is a complete analogue of the first RAM, developed by the Institute researchers. The whole structure is a grid of wires with cores of magnetic rings. Each ring contains 1 bit of information available for one write-read cycle.

Of course, Jay Forrester and his followers did not see this technology as “simple”, but today this, of course, is not fantastic. In short, the first RAM was practical, reliable, and relatively fast. The time it took to request and receive information was a microsecond. Which is hundreds of thousands of times slower than modern RAM, but for 1951 it was a scientific achievement.

Bernard Widrow, who worked on the same team with Forrester, last year gave an interview to Edison Technical Center , where he said that “he couldn’t imagine what happened to RAM in a million years, not to mention half a century”. The Whirlwind Project remained active until 1959, although the technology was never used in flight simulators. But the patent was obtained and what it all came out today, I think there is no need to clarify.

source: Wired