Near the end of WWII, Jay Forrester took on a project to build the first aircraft simulator that could simulate any aircraft. He quickly realized that the analog computing tools of the day were no where near fast enough to perform the many calculations required to determine what an airplane would do when the pilot controls were moved. He had heard rumors of electronic digital calculators that were much faster, so he expanded the project to include such a device. No one knew if such a machine was even possible, but he and his team set about learning how to build one. The result was the first real-time computer – a machine that could take inputs in the form of a bunch of sensor readings and immediately respond with an appropriate output. The project, and the computer, were called “Whirlwind”. The final product could take radar information and track aircraft on a CRT screen. If that sounds like our current air traffic control system, you would be correct, although there were a number of steps in between. The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was a Cold War implementation of Whirlwind that was also one of the first computer networks.
Magnetic core memory was perhaps the most valuable by-product of the Whirlwind project. At the time, the best and highest density form of computer memory was something called a Williams Tube. While faster than mercury delay tubes, Williams tubes were temperamental and difficult to manufacture. Keep in mind that before 1950, all computers were essentially experiments to find what worked. Jay Forrester in another of his brilliant insights set about looking for a material that could act as a binary storage device. The result was toroids of iron-oxide molded into rings. The rings were strung on wires used to read and write the state of the magnet, in other words which way it was magnetized. One direction was a zero and the other was a one. Core memory was the industry standard thru the era of the IBM 360 until about 1970. To this day, when a computer system bombs and produces a file to be used to find the problem, that file is called a “core dump”.
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