Whirlwind I

The Whirlwind computer (of English. " Whirlwind" for " whirlwind " ) was developed from 1945 to 1952 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a awarded during the Second World War for the U.S. Navy by Jay Forrester and Robert Everett. The Whirlwind should be a flight simulator, you should learn how to deal with unexpected situations in which pilots of the U.S. Navy. Forrester and his colleagues Perry Crawford and Robert Everett first built an analog computer, but came to one of the first ENIAC demonstrations on the idea of ​​using a digital computer. It was the first computer with real-time processing and a screen ( cathode ray tube) is used as the output device. The system was launched for the first time on 20 April 1951, however, the military at that time had long since lost interest in it. Used Williams tubes were first ( Williams - Kilburn CRT storage tubes) and later (faster ) magnetic core memory as memory chips. A light pen as an input device used, which was also developed in 1949 at the Lincoln Laboratory. The computer itself consisted mainly of 5000 tubes and 11,000 semiconductor diodes.

The development of Whirlwinds led directly to the SAGE system, the U.S. Air Force and indirectly to the development of almost all computers in the 1960s.

Successors were the TX -0 ( already transistor- based) and the PDP -1.

Following the Whirlwind ( whirlwind ) developed by Heinz Zemanek transistor computer Mailüfterl got its name.