Jay Forrester (project director) — MIT Whirlwind real-time display

1951

Artists: Jay Forrester (project director), Robert Everett (associate director) · Year: 1951 · Medium: Real-time graphical computer display · Substrate: Whirlwind I digital computer with vector CRT display; magnetic-core memory · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: MIT Lincoln Laboratory / MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory Whirlwind I, the real-time digital computer developed at MIT from 1945 and operational by 1951, was not designed to make art. It was designed to solve the problem of real-time flight simulation for Navy pilots, and later to track Soviet bombers through the SAGE air-defense network. But it produced, as a byproduct of its architecture, the first real-time graphical display in computing history: a cathode-ray tube on which the computer could draw in real time, at human-comprehensible rates, under program control. The Whirlwind display is, technically, the direct ancestor of every computer-graphics display since. The Sketchpad demonstration that Ivan Sutherland would mount on the TX-2 in 1963 ran on hardware whose architecture descended directly from Whirlwind. The Stromberg-Carlson microfilm plotters that Bell Labs used for their 1960s computer art ran on CRT technology that MIT had proven. The contemporary frame-buffer graphics pipeline, through the Evans & Sutherland era and beyond, is continuous with the Whirlwind architecture. On April 20, 1951, Whirlwind was featured on Edward R. Murrow's See It Now television program. Project director Jay Forrester demonstrated the computer drawing a rocket's trajectory on its display, in real time, as Murrow spoke. This is the first time a general American audience saw a computer display real-time graphics. The moment is not widely remembered in art history, but every subsequent computer-art development depends on the hardware Murrow's cameras documented. Lore Whirlwind was a massive project — tens of millions of 1950s dollars, a full building at MIT, a team of dozens of engineers — and it was close to being cancelled multiple times before SAGE justified its continuing development. Whirlwind's magnetic-core memory, developed by Jay Forrester's team, was later licensed to every computer manufacturer and generated royalty income sufficient to underwrite MIT research for decades. The See It Now broadcast is preserved in the CBS archive. Whirlwind itself was retired in 1959; fragments are held at MIT Museum and Computer History Museum. Sources • MIT Lincoln Laboratory — Whirlwind technical reports • Redmond, Kent C.; Smith, Thomas M. — Project Whirlwind (Digital Press, 1980) • Computer History Museum — Whirlwind collection