ABSTRACT
The Servomechanisms Laboratory had been established in 1940 by Gordon Brown and Albert C. Hall. It was the outgrowth both of a Navy training program for gunfire control officers begun the year before in the electrical engineering department and of arrangements between Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Sperry Gyroscope Company for the development of remote control systems for ship-mounted anti-aircraft guns. At MIT, the digital computer being developed for the Navy's aircraft stability and control analyzer soon came to be viewed as the Institute's main general-purpose computer project. MIT prepared an extensive propaganda campaign in support of Whirlwind, describing the likely applications of the general-purpose computer and likening its development to that of radar and nuclear power. The engineers assigned to the new project, William Pease and James McDonough, had just completed Servo Lab work on the control system for the Brookhaven reactor, a major state-sponsored effort in continuous-process control technology, and was looking for "new worlds to conquer."
