Information Technology: At the dawn of the computer age

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” —Victor Hugo

In 1947, during a time when there were fewer than a dozen electronic digital computers in existence (what today are simply called computers), a group of twentysomething engineers, mostly from MIT, began to build the world's first real-time, general-purpose, electronic digital computer.Whirlwind (computer). After a year of block diagramming the machine, they moved into an old laundry building (formerly the E&R Laundry Co. built in 1904) at 211 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, MA, to begin the process of bringing their leviathan of a computer to life. In 1948, then known as the Barta Building because of its last owner, Barta Press, the building was barely a stone's throw from the front door of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and about a 100 yards from the banks of the Charles River (which separates Boston from Cambridge). The machine they built they named Whirlwind (it was as large as a small gymnasium). Parts of the machine are today on view in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

In order to get an idea of how massive Whirlwind was, please see photography, plus a large schematic drawing, available for viewing. Whirlwind was capable of processing 5,000 instructions per second; a laptop of today with a small 500 MHz chip can do a half billion. In 1950, however, 5,000 instructions a second was more than enough to kick start Information Technology.

By 1950, Whirlwind was up and running, although it still lacked its most critical component, RAM in the form of magnetic core memory. Until the advent of core memory, Whirlwind used large glass tubes called electrostatic storage tubes. Each tube held one bit and cost $1,000 to make (the Barta Building had its own tube-making facility). The lifespan for an electrostatic storage tube was approximately 30 days. Whirlwind's monthly glass bill was enormous. One of Whirlwind's engineers, group leader Jay Wright Forrester, finally perfected magnetic core memory, and in September 1953 core memory was installed in Whirlwind. Core memory remained the dominant form of RAM until Intel's first chip came out in 1971.

The world's first information machine and wide area network (WAN) in 1953

The provenance of today's electronic, digital information culture began in the Barta Building with Whirlwind. Every digital information device of today traces its lineage back to that single machine. It's the great granddad of the Internet...even Wikipedia! In 1950, every electronic digital computer in the world—and there were only 12 such computers—used IBM punch cards or arcane wiring schemes to operate. And when they were in operation, each could only calculate a problem and regurgitate an answer.

Whirlwind was the first computer to use a keyboard and GUI (Graphical User Interface). A user could touch the ICONS on Whirlwind's screen and directly interact with the computer's memory. A user could type commands into Whirlwind and it would react. These were momentous advances in computing. As John Patrick vice president of internet technology at IBM says, "The evolution of the Internet is based upon technical things, but in the end it is not about technology itself, it is about what the technology can enable." Much the same can be said about Whirlwind. What Whirlwind "enabled" for Information Technology can be readily seen in its long and incredible list of "firsts".

Here are but a few, the more important of Whirlwind's "firsts":

First real-time digital computer. First digital network. First application of and first systematic use of Information Technology. First practical application of information theory. First magnetic-core memory (remained the dominant form of computer memory until 1973). First digital phoneline transmission and modems. First interactive graphical interface.First light pen (early form of computer mouse), first computer keyboard, and first duplexed computers.

First real-time software, which evolved into assemblers, compilers, and interpreters. First software diagnosis programs; first time-shared operating systems; first structured program modules; first table-driven software; and first data description techniques.First operating manuals. First software manuals. First computer systems management organization. First user groups. First user training. First formalized the profession of software programming.

First computer technicians. First factory-assembled computer system in commercial American computer and electronics industry (IBM manufactured 56 computers).First automated, national air defense system. First application of real-time command and control. First computer tracking of air traffic control for commercial aviation. First large-scale systems engineering project.

The U.S. government took Whirlwind and built the SAGE air defense system;4 IBM took Whirlwind, and together with American Airlines, built the Sabre system, which is a computer reservations system/global distribution system (GDS) used by airlines, railways, hotels, travel agents and other travel companies.Sabre (computer system) Whirlwind "enabled" an information society to get to its feet for the very first time. Two of Whirlwind's progeny (the TX-2 and the AN/FSQ-32) enabled the early Internet (ARPANET) for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network created by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War, was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.ARPANET

The ability for real-time and near-real-time operation was the key ingredient

Critical to the future of computing were the facts that Whirlwind operated in real time (all other computers of the time calculated answers to problems in hours to days); and that the machine was a general purpose machine, i.e. it did more than just calculate the answers to difficult or intractable math problems. Whirlwind could control other processes and machines, and it could run for days without a failure, once running for 45 straight days without stopping once.Here's a link to the original 136-page, 1947 diagrams and specifications for Whirlwind.

Fast calculations producing rapid information in real time and the fact that it was a general purpose machine, made Whirlwind the machine of the future. Computer historian Stan Augarten remarked,

"Above all, Whirlwind taught the American computer industry how to design and build large, interconnected, real-time data-processing systems.Through Whirlwind, technology was transferred to the world at large, and computer systems as we know them today came into existence."

In 1953, with magnetic core memory installed (increasing Whirlwind's speed 10 fold), the young engineers then created the world's first digital network from Truro, MA to Cambridge, MA. Although the intended purpose of Whirlwind and its digital network was to create an air defense system for the United States, the unintended consequence of Whirlwind's system was that it pioneered what today we call Information Technology or IT.

In 2010, the world will celebrate the 60th anniversary of that pioneering effort: 1950-2010

Here are the names of those Information Technology pioneers: Jay Forrester, Bob Everett. Harris Fahnestock,Robert Nelson, C. Robert Wieser, Norman Taylor, David Israel, Jack Arnow, Robert Walquist, Tom Dodd, Bill Papian, John Harrington, W. Gordon Welchman, Ken Olsen, Howard Kirschner, Jack Gilmore, F. E. Swain, Hugh Boyd, Charley Adams, Jack Salzer, Pat Youtz, David Brown, Gus O'Brien, Herbert Bennington, John Jacobs, William Linvill, Charles Zraket, and Ken McVicar.

There is a podcast that describes this pioneeing effort at: http://www.brightboys.org/podcast/BrightBoys_Pod_Final.mp3

There are several YouTube videos that also recount that effort, most notably that by Stanford University Professor Bernard Widrow at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmRtNmnRdNI

There is a new book that chronicles the Whirlwind's Information Technology history at: http://www.brightboys.org

It was only after the introduction of the Whirlwind digital network in 1953 that the world started taking note that information was important.

"A near-impossible concept for anyone to fathom in 1946 would have been that of Information Technology. Information itself was only of marginal interest, and then mostly as chunks of data for things like insurance actuary tables or for the census every ten years.”

Information was so new, in fact, that professor Alex Rathe claimed,

“as late as 1946 there were in the combined professional, technical and scientific press of the United States only seven articles on the subject of information.”

Information today, of course, is taken more seriously: it’s become an essential commodity.

“Theories based on the concept of ‘information’ have so permeated modern culture that it is now widely taken to characterize our times.”

Yoking such a paucity of research on information with the word technology seemed beyond even the keenest intellects of the day. A retrospective on business management for Duns Review in 1958 would point out that

“Only in the past dozen years [since 1946] has the concept of information—as distinct from the papers, forms, and reports that convey it—really penetrated management’s consciousness. That it has done so is largely due to recent breakthroughs in cybernetics, information theory, operations research, and the electronic computer.”

Breakthroughs that all came together in Whirlwind.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Technology sees it, Information Technology’s fingers are into everything, essentially all the

“collecting, storing, encoding, processing, analyzing, transmitting, receiving, and printing of text, audio, or video information.”

Whirlwind made information easy to create, easy to compile, and easy to use. Before Whirlwind there was a pristine simplicity to the notion of information. The word information seems simple enough, deriving from the Latin, informare, meaning, “to put into form.” However, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Technology makes us aware, when the word technology is appended to that of information, all hell breaks loose.

Today the word information has taken on a whole new spin: it’s anything and everything…and it’s powerful. Charles Seif, the well-known physicist and journalist, likens us to information beings.

“Each creature of the Earth,” he writes in Decoding the Universe,” is a creature of information; information sits at the center of our cells, and information rattles around in our brains.”

Beginning in 1950, Whirlwind first pioneered our brash new world of Information Technology and in 2010 the 60th anniversary of that grand adventure will be celebrated.

Look here for more on the genesis of Information Technology in the coming weeks.

[edit]

References

• Stan Augarten. Bit by Bit - An Illustrated History of Computers. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984,p. 196.
• Thomas Haigh.“Inventing Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950-1968” Business History Review 75 (Spring 2001): p. 12.
• Michael S. Mahoney.“The History of Computing in the History of Technology.” Annals of the History of Computing, October, 1988,p.113.
• Op cit, Haigh, p. 12.
• Charles Seif, Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes. New York: Viking/Penguin 2006, p.3.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Technology: Information Technology.
• From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer (History of Computing) Kent C. Redmond, Thomas M. Smith, The MIT Press (October 2000)
• Tom Green "Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology" (unpublished manuscript) 2008