DEC Chief Engineer Dick Best and Colleague Wally Wheaton Testing Magnetic Core Memory

Accession: 102633143

Description: Magnetic core memory was the dominant computer memory technology from roughly 1955 to 1975. Made up of thousands of tiny ceramic rings, or “cores,” each capable of storing a binary 1 or 0, it was robust and reliable for its time. A 16 KB core memory for the 18‑bit PDP‑1, for example, contained nearly 300,000 individual cores.

In this photograph, DEC Chief Engineer Dick Best and colleague Wally Wheaton use a custom-built tester on the production floor of DEC’s Maynard, Massachusetts “Mill” factory to check the quality of a core memory stack, visible at the front of the image.