ABSTRACT
Forrester and Bob Everett had spent the previous October dashing out another defense of Whirlwind to counter the Office of Naval Research’s claim that Whirlwind and von Neumann’s IAS computer were mostly identical machines. The special-purpose IAS machine was not the proper tool for, say, air traffic control, but Whirlwind was. Von Neumann’s machine would not be operational until 1952, three years after Whirlwind cranked into action. By October 1945, a month following Forrester’s meeting with Gordon Brown and his selection of the ASCA project, Crawford began working for Luis de Florez at the Navy’s Special Devices Division. As luck would have it, one of Crawford’s new duties was as the Navy evaluator for what would become Project Whirlwind. By March of 1950, the bright boys had 16 of their own hand-built, electrostatic storage tubes in Whirlwind. Whirlwind as well as every other electronic digital computer had somehow to ditch glass bottles forever.
