To celebrate Einstein‘s Alley‘s Tenth Anniversary, the joint Board and Advisory Council met at the Sarnoff Collection housed at The College of New Jersey. They remembered that the first Einstein‘s Alley board meeting was held in David Sarnoff’s dining room at SRI/Sarnoff, the old RCA Labs.

TCNJ President, Barbara Gitenstein welcomed the group and spoke about some of the challenges and positive developments in higher education especially when it came to STEM fields.  The group had a fascinating docent led tour of the treasures of early communications and computer technology on display.

256-bit magnetic core memory_ circa 1952_ Slow data retrieval and storage speeds limited the utility of early computers. RCA researcher Jan Rajchman_s solution was a memory array consisting of a wire matrix with doughnut-shaped magnetic cores at each intersection. By applying a current to a given set of horizontal and vertical wires_ you could select a specific core and quickly change the direction of its magnetic field. Photo_ Suzanne Kantak

From IEEE Magazine by Benjamin GrossThe history of the Radio Corporation of America is in many ways the history of 20th-century American innovation. From the company’s founding in 1919 to its sale in 1986, the RCA name was synonymous with products that shaped how Americans lived and worked. Long before the rise of Silicon Valley, RCA Laboratories, in Princeton, N.J., was at the center of the nation’s consumer electronics industry, harnessing the creative impulses of thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians to systematize the invention of new technologies.