Jay W Forrester Essay Research Paper One

Jay W. Forrester Essay, Research Paper

One

of the pioneers of the digital computer industry, Jay W. Forrester invented

the Multicoordinate Digital Information Storage Device (Patent No. 2,736,880).

His invention became known as magnetic-core memory storage, a precursor

to today’s RAM technology, and was first used in Project Whirlwind,

a monster computer developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

in the early 1950s as part of the United States’ strategic defense

against the Soviet Union.

During World War II, the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics commissioned

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an aircraft flight

simulator that could be used both to train pilots and to simulate flight

characteristics for aircraft designers. The task of designing and building

the simulator fell to an MIT graduate student named Jay Forrester. He

would end up not building the system the Navy had in mind, but what he

did create would have a far greater impact on the evolution of the digital

computer.

Forrester came to MIT from his native Nebraska, where he was born on

a cattle ranch near Climax on July 14, 1918. After graduating from the

University of Nebraska in 1939 with a degree in electrical engineering,

Forrester began his graduate studies at MIT, working first as a research

assistant in MIT’s High-Voltage Laboratory.

In 1940, Forrester switched to MIT’s new Servomechanisms

Laboratory, founded by Gordon S. Brown as a division of the school’s

Electrical Engineering Department. In late 1944, the request came in from

the Navy for a flight simulator, and Brown assigned Forrester to the project.

Called the Airplane Stability and Control Analyzer (ASCA), its original

concept was based on analog techniques to simulate flight. The pilot would

operate actual controls and the simulated aircraft would respond to the

pilot’s commands in real time. However, Forrester soon realized that

a mechanical computer would be far too slow and cumbersome, certainly

not capable of providing the real-time response desired by the Navy.

In early 1946, Perry Crawford, one of Forrester’s colleagues, proposed

a possible solution to the problem. Crawford had written his master’s

thesis on using electronic digital computing devices for fire control.

He suggested the same approach for flight simulation to Forrester.

In April 1946 the ASCA contract was modified to reflect the project’s

new digital focus and the project became known as Whirlwind. The original

flight simulator Forrester was commissioned to design was never built,

but it would evolve into the Whirlwind project, which would create the

first digital computer to run in real time.

When completed and put into service in late 1949, Whirlwind was

a monster, with 3,300 electrostatic storage tubes and 8,900 crystal diodes.

A two-story building was required to house the large machine. Power supplies

occupied the basement, with storage and data communications housed on

the main floor. One floor up sat Whirlwind’s central processing unit,

console and CRT displays. The heat generated by Whirlwind’s tubes

and diodes was removed with specially designed air conditioning equipment

on the building’s roof.

Whirlwind’s electrostatic storage tubes, which Forrester

had modified to improve their performance, were far superior to the vacuum

tubes that were commonly in use at the time, but they still had their

problems. They had limited storage capacity, and even with Forrester’s

modifications, they lasted only a month or so. This made Whirlwind somewhat

slow and less than reliable, and Forrester decided to investigate more

powerful, faster, and reliable storage solutions.

He first worked on a cube-shaped device that contained neon cells. However,

the neon proved to be unreliable and slow, and he moved to Deltamax, a

nickel-iron alloy first developed by the Germans in World War II for magnetic

amplifiers in tanks and then being used in the U.S. as a core material

for magnetic amplifiers. Forrester discovered that rings made of Deltamax—when

charged with an electric current running in opposite directions—would

retain the original direction of each charge.

Deltamax proved Forrester’s theory, but it was too slow and sensitive

to be viable. Further experiments were necessary, and with the assistance

of MIT graduate student William Papian, Forrester tested several types

of magnetic cores, finally settling on a series of doughnut-shaped pieces

of magnetic ferrite held in place by a three-dimensional array of wires.

After testing them in a special computer, they were moved to the Whirlwind

computer in the summer of 1953.

Meanwhile, questions arose concerning Whirlwind’s future. It had

been a costly system for the Navy to build and its applications seemed

limited. Many wondered if

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