Forrester and his colleagues could see only one solution, albeit a fabulously extravagant one: spend $1 million on a whole new computer just to test core memory. So that was exactly what they did, with the Pentagon's signing the checks. Work on the Memory Test Computer started in May 1952. And a little over a year later, the first eight-thousand-word bank of fully tested core memory was wired into Whirlwind itself. The results were dramatic: the operating speed doubled, the data-input rate quadrupled, and maintenance time was reduced from four hours per day to two hours per week. Memory had
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