The Untold Story of Everything Digital Bright Boys, Revisited

Introduction

Foreword by Jay Forrester

Chapter One
Terror at the Pentagon Taxi Stand

The Soviet Union surprises the world when it explodes its first atomic bomb in August of 1949; and North America has no air defense to guard against a Soviet sneak attack. In September of 1949, George Valley, MIT physicist and WWII radar expert, is asked to build a continent-wide, early warning radar umbrella to defend against a possible Soviet nuclear air raid. His plan is perfect except for one glaring unknown: how to instantaneously calculate bomber flight paths detected by radar and vector fighter jets to intercept them. Valley and a colleague, John Marchetti, immediately begin a nationwide hunt for that calculating solution.

Chapter Two
Jay’s Dilemma

MIT servomechanisms engineer and electronics project leader, Jay Forrester, convinces the Office of Naval Research (ONR), as part of his ONR contract for a flight trainer, to fund his plan to build a first-ever electronic digital computer that calculates in real time. They name the computer Whirlwind. When he drops the flight trainer to concentrate on the computer, he runs afoul of ONR expectations, and his contract is threatened with cancellation. By the spring of 1949, in addition to contract problems, he also has a technical problem to overcome in devising fast and stable random-access memory (RAM). Both problems loom menacingly throughout 1949, threatening completion of and any potential success for Whirlwind.

Chapter Three
The Whistle Factory

In 1946 there were no digital computing conferences or tradeshows, or college courses on the subject, no how-tos or journals to explain it, no computer shops, supply houses, or manufacturers of digital components anywhere in the world. There was, however—by-invitation-only—a summer of digital lectures at the Moore School of Engineering sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. military: The Theory and Techniques for the Design of Electronic Digital Computers. It was digital computing’s coming-out party. Forrester and his colleague, Bob Everett, were invited along with 26 other soon-to-be-famous, new-age digerati, including very interested military code breakers, spies and security agents. Forrester and Everett knew little about a digital computer, so this was a great first step in trying to build one.

Chapter Four
The Buildout

From late 1946 through 1947, the Whirlwind computer was planned for and block diagrammed by a bright-boy crew lead by Bob Everett. In 1948, they began to build their first-ever, real-time computing machine. Whirlwind’s buildout was filled with problem solving, hard work, self-satisfaction and success, but also threats from the ONR for excessive costs, envy from academics for being no-name engineers undeserving of a fat, government contract; suspicion from electrical engineering departments that feared the rise of electronics, and meddling from government officials ignorant about the critical importance of Whirlwind. And still technically elusive was Forrester’s quest for fast, stable random-access memory (RAM).

Chapter Five
1949

1949 was a year of extremes for Whirlwind. The giant computer worked, and got better as the year progressed. Best of all—and a world’s first—Whirlwind’s computations were done in real time. The no names were suddenly becoming famous.

However, the ONR announced that it would end all Whirlwind funding by 1951. In addition, the federal government’s "Report on Electronic Digital Computers by the Consultants to the Chairman of the Research and Development Board," concluded that Whirlwind had no government mission and therefore recommended no federal funding.

Valley and Marchetti, while scouring the U.S. for a defense computer from their offices in Cambridge, accidentally stumble upon Whirlwind, just around the corner at 211 Massachusetts Avenue. Valley meets Forrester, who then introduces him to his behemoth digital computer, Whirlwind.

Chapter Six
Island in the Stream

A most improbable convergence had come to pass. All the right pieces from all the right people find each their own way into the drab, old building on Massachusetts Avenue at exactly the right time. Forrester, Everett and Whirlwind team up with Valley and Marchetti, and their need to create a continent-wide air defense umbrella. Plans are put into place to use Whirlwind as a giant template for the assembly-line production of 48 clones of the machine, all backed with near-limitless funding from the United States Air Force. But first, Whirlwind would be put to the test of rapidly assembling radar data on its computer monitor, tracking bombers, and vectoring interceptor jets to destroy them.

Chapter Seven
Into the Great Wide Open

Forrester, Everett, and their Whirlwind bright boys suddenly go from unknown, misfit engineers accused of wasting ONR money to designers of a national computer system that would rival in size the Manhattan Project. And George Valley is the guy who makes it all happen; he has travelled light years from the back seat of a taxi with Bob Robertson. Forrester and Everett, instead of beating the bushes from Cambridge to Washington, DC to find government funding or work contracts on which just to get by, where now the sole selection committee deciding which bidders from IBM to Remington Rand to Raytheon to Sylvania, would build billions of dollars’ worth of Whirlwind clones.

Chapter Eight
Voices in the Machine

In 1953 Forrester snapped the first frame of his magnetic-core memory into Whirlwind. Unreliable computer memory quickly became a thing of the past. Programmers gained confidence that software routines would run properly; companies gained confidence that calculations of their all-important business data were stable. For the next twenty years magnetic-core memory would become the standard RAM for all computers.

Forrester, Everett and their bright boy colleagues then taught IBM engineers how to build Whirlwind clones on an assembly line, which helped catapult IBM into the world’s most powerful computer company.

Whirlwind’s clones became known as the SAGE computer system, which not only served as air defense computers but also became the standard for both civilian and military air-traffic control worldwide.

Seemingly overnight, the world was quickly and irrevocably going digital…and was the better for it.

Biography

Tom Green, journalist, writer and video producer, has been reporting on and producing programming about technology for over two decades.

Green is the founder (2017), publisher and editor in chief of Asian Robotics Review. Previously, 2012-2016, he launched and was founding editor in chief of Robotics Business Review (a property of EH Publishing). Green was also on-air host and lead researcher (2013-2016) for Robotics Business Review’s webcast programs, as well as lead editor and contributing author for Robotics Business Review’s annual series of robotics research reports.

Green has spoken at national and international robotics events and conferences; has been the subject of interviews on robotics with Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, Swissquote, and CNN Money, among others; and also serves as a consultant and adviser on robotics from startups to multi-national corporations.

Formerly, as a TV writer/producer at Boston’s ABC affiliate WCVB-TV, Channel 5, he wrote and produced the news program Lifelines; and was lead writer on weekly sitcom Park Street Under. His work has been twice nominated for Emmy Awards.

His stage plays were produced at Boston’s Next Move Theatre and then reproduced as radio plays for National Public Radio. Green’s In the Room the Women Come and Go won a UNICO national short story award.

Green owned and operated his own video production company for ten years where he produced video for corporations, broadcast, and cable TV.

He is the author of the Amazon best seller Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology (Taylor & Francis, 2010).

Green’s newest book, The Untold Story of Everything Digital, Bright Boys, Revisited, published by Taylor & Francis (London) goes on sale October 2019.

Web address for The Untold Story of Everything Digital

http://www.brightboysmedia.com/untold-story.html

"For those studying the complexities of technological change, this volume plus Bright Boys forms a foundation for understanding how our ensnarled ‘system of digital systems’ was created, nurtured, then exploded worldwide. Must be examined by any serious student of the history of technology."
—Dik Daso, Author of Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Airpower, and Doolittle: Aerospace Visionary

"Informed and informative, The Untold Story of Everything Digital: Bright Boys, Revisited is a unique and extraordinary history and one that unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library collections"
—John Burroughs, Midwest Book Review

"This book tells the story of the first few years of modern computing in the USA. The 180 pages give a detailed account of the many different people and organisations working with computing from 1949 up until around 1955.

The book opens with a clear introduction to different aspects of the situation in the USA. On the one hand a group of pioneering "computer scientists" (a term we have only created subsequently) who are at the cutting edge of developing and building computers, and on the other hand the realisation by the US military of the need for quick analysis of vast amounts of data (principally the need to analyse radar data from thousands of low-level radar stations to be able to intercept a potential low-level bombing raid from Russian planes).

There are many aspects of these early days of computing that I knew nothing about, and this book has taught me many fascinating things."
—The Mathematical Gazette