An Wang filed a magnetic-core memory patent in 1949, two years before Jay Forrester's 1951 filing

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Patent-filing records place Harvard physicist An Wang well ahead of Jay Forrester in the race to patent magnetic-core computer memory. Per the Computer History Museum: "Amateur inventor Frederick W. Viehe filed a core memory patent in 1947 followed by Harvard physicist An Wang in 1949. RCA's Jan Rajchman and MIT's Jay Forrester filed in 1950 and 1951 respectively." On this sequencing, Forrester was the fourth of four named filers — two years behind Wang and one behind RCA's Rajchman — not the technology's originator, even though this vault's own entity page for Forrester has, until now, carried "invented magnetic-core computer memory" as unqualified biography. A 1948 Harvard demonstration by Wang is not reported on this CHM page — that detail comes from the cluster's other source, the unreviewed MIT course paper (see claim-forrester-self-credited-as-sole-core-memory-inventor-downplaying-core-culture), and carries that note's Tier 3 caveats; an earlier wording here misattributed it to "the same source" (corrected 2026-09-13, original preserved in audit_status).

The claim is quantitative — a specific sequence of filing years — and currently rests on a single Tier 3 museum web page rather than the patent filings themselves or a peer-reviewed account (the originating capture names Pugh, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 1984, as a lead, not read directly). Per the vault's sourcing floor, dates require Tier 1–2 sourcing before this note can leave seedling; tracked at question-verify-core-memory-patent-filing-dates-primary-sources. See also claim-forrester-self-credited-as-sole-core-memory-inventor-downplaying-core-culture for the self-credit narrative this sequencing complicates.