Secret wars

‘Airbrushed from history’: The mysterious death of the little known Forrest Gump of Cold War computing

...Outside of the aficionados of computing history, few people know the importance of Dr Dudley Buck and the immense legacy he left behind. As an electrical engineer at MIT in the 1950s, he was part of the team who invented the first RAM computer memory before going on to create an early version of the flash drive. He contributed to the first light gun devices and devised big data coding systems crucial to the space race.

But his Croytron invention — a prototype superconductive computer chip that worked in freezing temperatures and which Buck hoped would become the fundamental building block for future digital computers — is what got the most attention.

Including from the Russians.

At this point in history, the USSR were quite far behind in the computing arms race in part because Stalin had suppressed certain kinds of research over concerns that computers would replace workers.