Events and Sightings

Project Whirlwind Reunion and Collection Transfer

A reunion of the Project Whirlwind team took place on June 30 at Le Meridien Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The event featured a ceremony marking the transfer of documents detailing pioneering digital computing research conducted in the 1940s and 1950s from Mitre ( www.mitre.org ) to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the contents are now available to the public for the first time through the MIT Libraries and Institute Archives. Guests of honor included Jay Forrester, a professor of management at MIT and pioneer of the field of system dynamics, and Robert Everett, Mitre’s first technical director and later president from 1969 to 1986. Together, Forrester and Everett led the 70-member Whirlwind research team at MIT’s Digital Computer Laboratory (see Figure 1) as director and associate director, respectively.

Whirlwind I, the first digital computer at MIT and the fastest of its time, was completed in 1951. It took up 3,300 square feet within a two-story building. The precursor to modern-day computers, Whirlwind’s fingerprints are evident in today’s software and hardware, including parallel digit processing, random-access memory, magnetic-core memory—which made the initial launching of commercial computers possible—and the interactive visual computer display. In operation until 1959, Whirlwind’s groundbreaking design also laid the foundation for simulation and real-time technology and formed the basis for the US Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system, the development of which led to Mitre’s creation. Mitre assumed custody of the Whirlwind collection in 1958, upon Everett and other Whirlwind researchers’ move from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to Mitre—then a newly established not-for-profit corporation formed to provide the Air Force with ongoing systems engineering support for North America’s air defense.

Judy Clapp, a member of Project Whirlwind and a Mitre retiree, headed the committee that organized the reunion. Speaking at the event, Mitre President and CEO Alfred Grasso commented on the collection transfer, calling it “a fitting tribute—particularly after celebrating our 50th anniversary last year—to return this significant piece of history to the academic home of Mitre’s roots.” MIT President Susan Hockfield praised Mitre’s stewardship of the collection. Andrew Gerber, associate division head of Air and Missile Defense Technology at Lincoln Laboratory, also attended the event, during which the collection’s website was demonstrated.

Three years ago, with input from Everett, Mitre’s Corporate Archives started the process of digitizing and getting public release approval for 1,800 Whirlwind memos and summary reports. Key documents are now available online through the MIT Libraries’ digital repository. (See http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/37456 for information.) “Realizing that MIT has one of the pre-eminent technical archives in the world, with resources to support public research, and realizing that the Whirlwind collection was created under the auspices of MIT, the logical conclusion in the public interest and in the interest of archival provenance was to transfer the papers and copies of the newly digitized collection over to MIT,” said Mitre’s Manager of Corporate Records and Archives George Despres, who led the effort to transfer the historic materials. Despres recognized Clapp and Tom Rosko, head of MIT Archives, for their assistance with the transfer.

IEEE Computer Society Awards

In June 2009, IEEE Computer Society honored three pioneers with its Computer Pioneer and Computer Entrepreneur Awards. Jean Jennings Bartik received the Computer Pioneer Award, “For pioneering work as one of the first programmers, including co-leading the first teams of ENIAC programmers, and pioneering work on BINAC and UNIVAC I.” Bartik holds a BS in mathematics from Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University), an MS in english from the University of Pennsylvania, and an honorary doctor of science from Northwest. Northwest also established the Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum to house a the history of computing and its emphasis is on PCs, Digital’s PDP-11, ENIAC, BINAC, and Univac. Her speech at the award ceremony is available at http://www2.computer.org/portal...