Computing · 1953

Magnetic-core memory

Tiny ferrite rings that held the world's data for twenty years.

Jay Forrester's team installed core memory in MIT's Whirlwind in 1953, doubling its speed. Woven by hand, cores were fast, non-volatile and reliable, and dominated main memory until DRAM in the 1970s.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Stored-program architecture 1945
Electromagnetic induction 1831

What it led to 3

Time-sharing 1961
CDC 6600 1964
IBM System/360 1964

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Cost of memory and storage Latest: Memory: 1.09k $/TB (2023) Source: Our World in Data

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6