In one of the technical reports the memistor was described as follows:

A memistor is a nanoelectric circuitry element used in parallel computing memory technology.

The memistor was also used in Madaline.

Other scientists had proposed dynamic memory resistors such as the memistor of Bernard Widrow, but Chua attempted to introduce mathematical generality.

Solid-state circuit elements were required to achieve the scalability of the integrated circuit which was gaining popularity around the same time as the invention of Widrow's memistor.

The ADALINE circuitry was briefly commercialized by the Memistor Corporation in the 1960s enabling some applications in pattern recognition.

Bernard Widrow coins the term memistor (i.e. memory resistor) to describe components of an early artificial neural network called ADALINE.

While the memristor is defined in terms of a two-terminal circuit element, there was an implementation of a three-terminal device called a memistor developed by Bernard Widrow in 1960.

Since the conductance was described as being controlled by the time integral of current as in Chua's theory of the memristor, the memistor of Widrow may be considered as a form of memristor having three instead of two terminals.