Article ID: CBB869829437

Recovering Software for the Whirlwind Computer (January-March 2021)

unapi

The late 1940s were seminal years in the development of electronic digital computing machines, as researchers began to realize the enormous potential held by these machines. One of these new generations of computing devices was the vacuum-tube Whirlwind computer, designed in the late 1940s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Designed from the start for real-time control applications, Whirlwind evolved to be a key element in a proof of concept for national air defense. The article starts with a review of Whirlwind and its evolving software environment, goes on to describe the current effort to decode some of the Whirlwind software artifacts remaining in museum archives, and then describes some of the material the work has made accessible, allowing us to further study some of the software developed during that formative decade.

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Authors & Contributors
Tinn, Honghong
Baker, Kevin T.
Elzway, Salem
Laakso, Mikael
Kneuper, Ralf
Mirowski, Alexander
Concepts
History of Computing
Computer Simulation
Software
Computers and computing
Models and modeling in science
Computer security; cyber security
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
Places
United States
New Zealand
Taiwan
India
Institutions
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
Control Data Corporation
Peter Norton Computing Corporation
Symantec Corporation
Club of Rome
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