In 1949 on October 21, Dr. An Wang filed for a patent for what was to become magnetic core memory.
He was working at the Harvard Computation Laboratory when he was told to find a way to record and read magnetically stored information without mechanical motion, and without demagnetizing it which would (as we call it today) delete the information.
Wang patented the "pulse transfer controlling device," which used a write after read methodology he came up with referring to the way the magnetic field of the cores could be used to control current switching in devices.
Wang sold his patent (to IBM of course) for a half a million $$ in the mid fifties and used a lot of this money to incorporate a company of his own which was an extremely influential one at these early days of computing history. The name of his company.... you guessed it, Wang Laboratories.
