Jan A. Rajchman, a Polish electrical engineer and, more importantly, a computer pioneer, was born in London on 10 August 1911. His father, Ludwik Rajchman was a bacteriologist and the founder of UNICEF. At the time when Jan A. Rajchman was born, the family lived in London, where his father held various positions at the Royal Institute of Public Health and King's College.

Jan received his degree in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1935, and became a "Doctor of Science" in 1938. By that time he had emigrated to the United States, where he joined RCA (Radio Corporation of America, www.rca.com) Laboratory, an important actor in the history of radio, television, and record player technology, directed by Vladimir K. Zworykin (1888-1982), inventor and television technology pioneer of Russian ancestry.

Rajchman is remembered as an extremely prolific inventor in technology history: he filed in 107 American patents including, among others, logic circuits for arithmetic. He conceived the first RoM (read-only memory), which was to be widely used in early computers.

The ill-fated Selectron tube (essentially a vacuum tube), one of the early versions of digital computer memory, was also developed by Rajchman. Development started in 1946, and 200 units were planned to be produced by the end of the year. However, production was far more difficult than expected, and the customer, the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), hallmarked by the name of John von Neumann, seeing the prolonged work, withdrew and switched to the similar Williams tube. RCA never produced a commercially viable Slectron tube...

"Core memory" is also, tough partly, linked to the name of Rajchman (Frederick Viehe and Jay Forrester were the two other, who invented it independent of Rajchman).

Rajchman was the director of RCA Computer Laboratory for a long time until the company left the business. He taught at Berkeley for a year, and eventually became an industry consultant to private firms.

He was the recipient of a number of awards, and held membership in several organisations in the field of science and technology. In 1974, he was awarded the IEEE Edison medal "for a creative career in the development of electronic devices and for pioneering work in computer memory systems".

He died on 1 April 1989.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_A._Rajchman