Forrester's core-memory patent inventorship was contested by RCA's Jan Rajchman, whose own application was filed earlier — filing order and legal priority diverged
An MIT Office of Public Relations background statement, issued 1964-04-14, records that Jay Forrester's core-memory patent (granted 1956) "was obtained in 1956, but his inventorship was contested in the Patent Office by Dr. Jan A. Rajchman, a researcher in the employ of Radio Corporation of America, who had filed in the Patent Office a patent application describing a form of magnetic memory system." Tom's Hardware, reporting on the same dispute, dates Rajchman's rival application to roughly "eight months earlier" than Forrester's. The contest ran through the Patent Office and then the U.S. District Court in New York; per the MIT statement, a 1964 consent judgment was required before "Forrester's position as inventor of the coincident-current core memory was established," alongside an IBM-to-MIT settlement the document records at "$13,000,000."
This separates two things a simple filing-date sequence conflates: who filed first, and who a court eventually recognized as the legal inventor. Rajchman filed before Forrester and still lost the inventor designation — a gap of roughly thirteen years between filing and legal resolution, decided by litigation rather than priority of paperwork. claim-wang-forrester-patent-records-confirm-1949-1951-filing-gap establishes that An Wang's 1949 filing also predates Forrester's, but Wang's patent covered a different core-memory technique and was never part of this particular contest — he sold his patent rights to IBM outright in 1955, leaving the RCA dispute as the one that actually tested Forrester's inventor status in court.
This also independently corroborates claim-forrester-self-credited-as-sole-core-memory-inventor-downplaying-core-culture: Forrester's inventor status was, at minimum, actively disputed rather than uncontested from the outset.
Source
“Forrester's patent was obtained in 1956, but his inventorship was contested in the Patent Office by Dr. Jan A. Rajchman, a researcher in the employ of Radio Corporation of America, who had filed in the Patent Office a patent application describing a form of magnetic memory system.”
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