An Wang's 1970 oral history frames Jay Forrester's core-memory contribution as a separate, later technical addition, not usurped credit

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In a 1970 Smithsonian/AFIPS oral history — recorded some fourteen years after Wang had already sold the core-memory patent (US 2708722) to IBM, "in 1956 or sometime" by his own account in the same transcript (p. 32), and over a decade before the priority dispute became a matter of historical debate — An Wang described Jay Forrester's and William Papian's MIT group as arriving at the magnetic-core problem only after learning of his own work. Interviewer Richard Mertz asked directly who visited Wang; Wang answered: "Papian and Forrester. Papian visited me. We have the date, if you look at the register. It's about six months or four months after my report on the core." Elsewhere in the interview Wang distinguishes the two men's work as technically separate rather than competing for the same credit: the coincident-current storage element was his own development, while the matrix-addressing scheme MIT built on top of it — "the MIT program had a lot more activity" — was Forrester's.

Nowhere in the full transcript does Wang characterize Forrester's later public credit-taking as exaggerated, self-promotional, or myth-making; the tone throughout is factual and unaccusatory, describing a storage-element invention and a separate matrix-organization invention built on it. This bears on claim-forrester-self-credited-as-sole-core-memory-inventor-downplaying-core-culture, whose "hero inventor" characterization of Forrester rests on a single Tier 3 unreviewed course paper: the one first-person account available from the man most likely to be aggrieved does not corroborate that characterization.