Thanks for the Memories Laptops, workstations, PlayStations,
iPhones--they would all be impossible without Robert Dennard's
invention of DRAM PHOTO: David Yellen Ask Robert Dennard about
the invention of DRAM, and he will probably do three things.
First, he will show you the patent notebooks IBM encouraged its
inventors to keep, which hold all his ideas about dynamic
random-access memory, meticulously dated and witnessed by other
people, ”to make sure we had proof of our inventions.” He stores
these pristine notebooks in an armoire under a wall crowded with
his awards. Second, he will spend half an hour showing you how
he had the revolutionary idea of substituting a single
transistor and a single capacitor for the memory technology then
being usedmagnetic rings, like miniature Cheerios, each of which
stored one bit based on the polarity of its magnetic field. He
will draw the circuit diagram for the one-transistor DRAM,
including every amplifier, data line, and inverter. Finally, he
will comment on a certain