Whirlwind
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The Whirlwind computer (from English "Whirlwind" for " whirlwind " ) was developed by Jay Forrester and Robert Everett from 1945 to 1952 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after an order from the US Navy during the Second World War . The Whirlwind was supposed to be a flight simulator in which US Navy pilots should learn to deal with surprising situations. To do this, he had to have real-time computer capabilities . Forrester and his colleagues Perry Crawford and Robert Everett first built an analog computer , but after one of the first ENIAC demonstrations they came up with the idea of using a digital computer. It was the first computer with real-time processing, which, based on an idea by Forrester, was realized by an array of core memories, and which used a screen ( cathode ray tube ) as an output device. The system started for the first time on April 20, 1951. First Williams tubes (Williams-Kilburn CRT memory tubes) and later a (faster) magnetic core memory were used as memory modules. A light pen developed at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory served as the input device. The computer itself essentially consisted of 5,000 tubes and 11,000 semiconductor diodes and took up almost an entire hall.
After several years of development, the Navy no longer wanted to use it as a flight simulator, but for numerical tasks, while the MIT researchers wanted to continue using it for tracing aircraft and missiles and were successful. The Whirlwind project was the largest computer development project in the late 1940s, with an annual budget of $ 1 million and 175 employees. Even more money was available when the US launched the US Air Force's SAGE project , also developed at MIT, in response to the nuclear threat posed by Soviet long-range bombers . Whirlwind became part of the project, where it served as the basis for the development of better computers and, with its innovations, contributed indirectly to the development of almost all computers in the 1960s. Whirlwind was the first computer with a word length of 16 bits, which was then adopted by mini computers in the 1960s.
The successors were the TX-0 (already transistor-based ) at MIT and the PDP-1 at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
After being used at SAGE, it was rented in 1959 by one of the project members (Bill Wolf) for a symbolic dollar a year. In 1974 Ken Olsen and Robert Everett rescued essential parts for the Digital Computer Museum at DEC, through which it came to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. A unit of core storage can also be seen at the Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham, Massachusetts .
Others
The transistor computer Mailüfterl, developed by Heinz Zemanek , got its name based on the whirlwind .
literature
- RR Everett: The Whirlewind I Computer, in: Bell, Newell (Ed.), Computer Structures, McGraw Hill, 1971, online
- Kent C. Redmond, Thomas M. Smith: Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer, Bedford, MA: Digital Press 1980
Web links
- Documents on the Whirlwind Project, University of Kent
- On the Whirlwind story for women in IT
- To the Whirlwind project at MIT
