Willard Boyle (1924-2011)

摘要

One afternoon in 1969, Willard Boyle and I had a brainstorming session in his office at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Our aim was to work out how to move electrical charge through a semiconductor to make a memory device for computer applications. At the time, researchers were pursuing a type of computer memory called 'bubble memory'. This involved using a magnetic field to create small magnetized bubbles, each of which stored one bit of data, within a thin film of magnetic material, and then making these shift from one site within the film to the next. With an input device to inject the bubbles and a detec- tion device at the other end, the system offered a way to preserve and retrieve information.