Jay W. Forrester

(1918- ) born near Anselmo, Custer County, lived in Lincoln. Electrical engineer, educator, considered a pioneer in the early development of the digital computer, he invented in 1949 the random-access, coincident-current magnetic core memory during Project Whirlwind, which laid the foundations for the personal computer-to date, 1 billion have been purchased worldwide; elected to National Academy of Engineering in 1967, and inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame at Akron, Ohio in 1979; graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1939. Consult Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, March 30, 1952, p. D-1 and Robert Slater, Portraits in Silicon (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1987) 90-99 and Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists, Vol 2 (Gale, 1995) 670-673 and Scientific American, December 2001, pp. 84-91.

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