User:Loonel/Information technology 60th anniversary

Information Technology: 60th Anniversary 1950-2010
“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. 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 Forrester, finally perfected magnetic core memory, and in September of 1953 core memory was installed in Whirlwind. Core memory remained the dominant form of RAM until Intel's first chip came out in 1970.

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 Yountz, David Brown, Gus O'Brien, Herbert Bennington, and Ken McVicar.

There is a podcast that describes this pioneeing effort at:

There are several YouTube videos that also recount that effort, most notably that by Stanford University Professor Bernard Widrow at:

There is a new book that chronicles the Whirlwind's Information Technology history at:

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.