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Memory: the forgotten history
Computers happened not because of Charles Babbage, but because of the invention of electronically-controlled intermediate data storage.
The remaining bottleneck was mostly technical: past a very modest scale, sprockets and cams made it too cumbersome to shuffle data back and forth within the bowels of a programmable computing machine. The blueprint for a tube-based memory cell came from William Eccles and Frank Wilfred Jordan — a largely-forgotten duo of British inventors who proposed the following bistable circuit as a replacement for an electromechanical relay: And interestingly, the legacy of magnetic RAM still lives on: a company called Everspin Technologies sells magnetoresistive (MRAM) chips for embedded applications in sizes up to 16 MB.
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