Jay Forrester filed the first practical computer RAM patent 75 years ago this week — his Magnetic Core Memory patent would be granted five years later

Project Whirlwind - core memory, circa 1951, developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts, USA. Museum sign describes capacity as 2Kb.

75 years ago this week, on May 11th, 1951, MIT electrical engineer Jay Forrester filed the patent application for coincident-current magnetic core memory, a technology that became the dominant form of random-access storage in digital computers for two decades.

Granted as U.S. Patent 2736880 in February 1956, Forrester's invention evolved from MIT's Project Whirlwind, where unreliable vacuum-tube memory was failing to meet the demands of real-time Cold War air defense.