An Wang was born in 1920 in Shanghai. The son of a teacher, Wang went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in science from Chiao-t’ung University in Shanghai in 1940.
He made the decision to leave his ancestral home and left for the United States in 1945. There he earned a Ph.D. in applied physics and engineering from Harvard University in 1948.
Having been introduced to computers while at Harvard, Wang went on to invent the magnetic memory core in 1948.
His invention served as the core of computer memories until the advent of the microchip.
It has been argued that if An Wang hadn't invented magnetic memory core, the technological revolution may never have happened, or that it may well have been delayed by many years or even decades.
An Wang’s invention of the write-after-read cycle for magnetic cores solved early computing's biggest bottleneck. By allowing data to be read and immediately rewritten, it made reliable random-access memory possible.
Early computers used unreliable storage like acoustic delay lines or cathode-ray tubes that lost data.
The son of an English teacher, Wang had showed an early aptitude for mathematics. At just 13, he began attending the elite Shanghai Provincial High School, and in 1940 graduated Chiao Tung University, then widely regarded as the MIT of China. During World War II, Wang fled Japanese-occupied Shanghai for Guilin, where he led a small team that scavenged parts and improvised designs to build radios for military use. As the war drew to a close, Wang came an impressive second in a highly competitive exam that awarded two years of advanced training in the US to young engineers. Wang used his Nationalist government-sponsored study abroad opportunity to apply to Harvard.
Wang joined the Harvard Computation Laboratory under Howard Aiken, a pioneer in computing who was then developing the Mark IV, his first purely electronic computer for the US Air Force. It was here, within his first month on the job, that Wang conceived the idea of magnetic core memory.
For more than two decades, magnetic core memory powered nearly every computer in the world, making it one of the most important breakthroughs in making modern stored-program computers commercially viable.
Without his invention so many historical events may have been delayed. His magnetic core memory was pivotal in the space race. The onboard computer that navigated the Apollo spacecraft to the moon relied on magnetic storage. Indeed, the flight software was permanently encoded into "core rope memory," where wires were threaded through or around magnetic cores to represent binary ones and zeros.
While modern technology using silicon chips is superior, without Wang’s innovation research may have not focused so strongly on the importance of reliable RAM.
Magnetic core memory used tiny rings to store data as magnetic states. Modern silicon semiconductor RAM uses tiny electronic switches on a chip to store data as electrical charges. Silicon RAM is much faster, much smaller, and holds much more data than magnetic core memory.
The patent for Wang’s innovation ended up in IBM’s hands. Wang went on to found Wang Laboratories. In 1965, he introduced a desktop computer called “LOCI” that could generate logarithms with a single keystroke. By 1984, he had built Wang Laboratories into such a successful enterprise that he was estimated to be the fifth richest American. In 1970 he was estimated to be worth $23 million, around $197.96 million today. Not quite a billionaire but certainly rich for that day and age.
Wang served as president of the company until 1986 and was succeeded by his son Frederick. However, as revenues declined because of IBM’s domination of the personal computer market, Wang returned to the company in 1989 and fired Frederick. An Wang invented many basic components for word-processing systems and held about 40 patents in all.
Despite having a key hold throughout the 1960s and 1970s Wang Laboratories ultimately failed as it stubbornly clung to expensive, proprietary hardware while the tech industry had largely shifted rapidly toward affordable, open-standard personal computers and networked software. Having dominated the office word-processing market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the company missed the personal computer revolution, piled up massive debt, and ultimately filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 18th August 1992 and acquired by the Dutch computer network company Getronics in 1999.
As for An Wang he passed away in Boston, Massachusetts on the 24th March 1990 aged 70 years after a fight with oesophageal cancer.
An Wang may not be a household name, but his legacy is in everybody’s hand, as a mobile phone, or on their desk, as a laptop, or pretty much every piece of modern technology.
Without core memory entirely, computers would have relied on slower, costlier Williams tubes or delay lines for years, delaying affordable RAM and the mini-computer boom until reliable semiconductors matured in the late 1960s.
Of course it is all speculation, but without An Wang’s invention mainframes might have continued to be slow and unreliable. Systems like the IBM 704 would have used fragile cathode-ray tubes, making high-speed random access expensive and unreliable.
Memory would have stayed bulky and expensive, keeping computers out of smaller businesses and mid-sized labs for a considerable time to come. By the 1970s Wang technology was in offices across America and Europe. Without his invention the rise of affordable computers in the 1960s might have stalled until integrated circuits became cheaper.
There are those that believe that should Wang not have invented magnetic core memory, researchers may have made greater efforts to look for better solutions to unreliable storage tubes resulting in a rush to develop silicon chips and skip the magnetic core era and jump straight from vacuum tubes or early drums to solid-state chips. Of course this is highly speculative.
Inventions and innovations have often followed small steps rather than major leaps.
Wang’s invention gave computer users RAM and thus impressed upon them the usefulness of retaining memory on a device when powered down.
Without that experience many early users would have put up with the misgivings that came with early computers that lost their memory every time they were powered down
Links: Mocanyc / Britannica / Wikipedia: Wang Laboratories / Wikipedia: An Wang / LA Times
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