An Wang

Harvard physicist who demonstrated a working magnetic-core memory implementation in 1948 and filed a core-memory patent in 1949 — a year before RCA's Jan Rajchman and two before MIT's Jay Forrester — before founding Wang Laboratories, a major minicomputer and word-processor company.

Matters to this vault as the actual priority-holder displaced by Jay Forrester's own self-credited "sole inventor of core memory" narrative: a computing-hardware instance of the contested-attribution shape the vault's attribution-and-origin-myths cluster catalogues elsewhere, most concretely in its Song Jian one-child-policy self-credit leg.

References

• claim-an-wang-1949-patent-filing-predates-forresters-1951-core-memory-patent
• claim-wang-forrester-patent-records-confirm-1949-1951-filing-gap

Updates

• 2026-09-12: Wang's 1949 filing date is now confirmed directly from the patent record itself (US2708722A, read via patents.google.com), rather than resting only on the Tier 3 museum page this page previously cited. (claim-wang-forrester-patent-records-confirm-1949-1951-filing-gap)
• 2026-09-12: Wang's own 1970 Smithsonian oral history, read directly in full for the first time, describes Forrester's later matrix-organization scheme as a separate technical contribution built on his own storage-element invention, not as usurped or stolen credit — the tone throughout is factual and unaccusatory. (claim-an-wang-1970-oral-history-frames-forrester-contribution-as-separate-not-usurped)