Conversation: Jay W. Forrester

In 1972, when I was principal investigator for the Smithsonian-AFIPS Computer History Project, I asked Robert R. Everett, president of the Mitre Corporation, to host a gathering of key people from Project Whirlwind. The group, which included Jay W. Forrester, engaged in a freewheeling discussion about some of the major mile-stones that occurred during the evolution of that important first-generation computer. One of the topics I was most anxious to explore was the development of coincident-current magnetic-core memory, the advent of which -changed computer memory from the least reliable component in a computer to the most reliable. The discussion was lively but did not adequately portray what had happened in the magnetic-core-memory development. In 1975, when Christopher Evans recorded the tape we are excerpting here (with some editing), Jay Forrester related the history of the path leading to his technological breakthrough. -Henry S. Tropp