  The final major event in the early history of electronic computation was the development of magnetic core memory. Jay Forrester realised that the hysteresis properties of magnetic core (normally used in transformers) lent themselves to the implementation of a three-dimensional solid array of randomly accessible storage points. In 1949, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began to investigate this idea empirically. Forrester's early experiments with metallic core soon led him to develop the superior ferrite core memory. Digital Equipment Corporation undertook to build a computer similar to the Whirlwind I as a test vehicle for a ferrite core memory. The Memory Test Computer was completed in 1953. (This computer was used in 1954 for the first simulations of neural networks, by Belmont Farley and Wesley Clark of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory (see Copeland and Proudfoot [1996]).