ABSTRACT
Named Whirlwind, it was a massive machine that filled 2,500 square feet of an old but stately looking former commercial laundry, called the Barta Building that sat on the corner of 211 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the ubiquity of digital computing today—in a world “going digital” in every conceivable way—it’s hard to imagine that Whirlwind and its creators were not more appreciated from the git-go. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) reason being that Whirlwind was not the flight trainer that Forrester and company had contracted to build. As such, in the eyes of the ONR and many others, Whirlwind had no defined mission, no purpose—which also caught the attention of the government’s Panel on Electronic Digital Computers that was looking to eliminate government-financed computers deemed to have no mission. Only when Whirlwind finally cranked into action and began changing the world did minds awaken to the prowess of a digital computer.
