The History of Memory

In this weeks blog we were asked to research the history of Memory. Give some timelines and some interesting points that we learned from this research. Here is what I learned :


In 1932 in Austria, the magnetic drum was invented. It had 1o KB in capacity and was widely used in the 1950`s- 60`s.


In 1946 the Selectron tube was invented. It had a capacity of 256-4096 bits (32-512 bytes) but had to many problems and was very expensive to make therefore it never really succeeded in the industry.

The magnetic Core memory was introduced to us in 1949 by Jay Forrester. This dominated in the 1950`s and remained popular through the 1970`s. This was a small donut wired into the grid that passed 1/2 of the current through 2 wires that met back at the core.


The Hard disk drive was invented in 1956 by IBM. It had 50 24-inch disks that held 5 million characters, just short of 5 MB.

The 1st DRAM chip was developed by Intel in 1970. It was the best selling semi conductor in the world by 1972. It was 1st used by HP in their 9800 series.

In 1984 Apple came out with their 128 KB memory Macintosh computer. The 1 MB chip was developed at this time.

In 1995 Extended Data Out EDO DRAM is developed and IBM released the 64-bit AS/400.

Double data rate DDR SDRAM 266 MHz was introduced to us in 2000.


In 2004 the DDR SDRAM was increased to 533 MHz. Intel introduces its Pentium 4 processors.

This brings you up to todays advanced state of Memory that we are learning about.


I researched all this material on the following sites : Pingdom.com, About.com, wizcraftcomputerservices.com and Timeline Help.