The Birth of DRAM (PCGH-Retro. Jun 04)

…1968: Whether with punch cards, tubes or electromagnets – storing digital information takes up a lot of space, is complex and expensive; there are viable solutions for long-term backup, but not for use as fast main memory. In the 1960s, some developers at IBM began to change this: they developed digital memory cells made of several transistors and capacitors, which made it easier to store information quickly and for a short time. The breakthrough is achieved by Dr. Robert Dennard, who in 1966 at IBM’s Thomas Watson Research Center developed the “Dynamic Random Access Memory” cell, which consists of just a single transistor and a capacitor; on June 4, 1968 he received the patent in the USA: DRAM was born. This makes it easier than ever to fit large amounts of the volatile but cheap main memory in a small space, and after the first DRAM chips became available in 1970, the new technology soon established itself as the standard. Even more than 40 years later, DRAM is still in every computer, as main memory, video memory or as a cache – and there is no sign of it being replaced.