Oral History of Robert Everett - Computer History Museum

Oral History of Robert Everett
Everett: No I worked covered in servo oil in the lab on the servo pumps and motors and the control
mechanisms, which were also hydraulic. About the only electrical things were selsyn motors, which were
part of the system. So that’s my career in the war.
Hendrie: Okay. Did you ever get a chance to go on any ships or to actually see this in action?
Everett: Well, the only ship I went on was the Lighthouse in Portland, which had one of these on it, one of
the prototypes we’d built. And Raytheon provided the radar. So, this thing was sick, and so one of the
Raytheon service guys and I went up to the ship in Portland Harbor. I had to change this drive…the
servos, and he worked on the electronics.
Hendrie: But this was testing it on a light ship, which, of course, bounces around a fair amount too.
Everett: Yes.
Hendrie: Okay. Good. So what happens next? What do you do next? The project is done?
Everett: Well, it was still going on but, you know, it’s the end of production so we…
Hendrie: Yes, it isn’t a full time job.
Everett: Yes. So I’ve forgotten, I guess, the details of just how it came about, but Jay and Gordon Brown
got mixed up in this business of building an airplane stability control analyzer. That was one of things that
were subject to great development during the war. And Luis de Florez who ran the special devices center
in the Navy, built a lot of these simulators and among them were aircraft simulators. Now they were…they
had a cockpit, usually a fixed cockpit. And then there was an array of servos of one sort and another, and
vacuum tubes, and flashing gas tubes, which approximated the equations for what the airplane would do
based on what you did with the controls. And somebody had the bright idea that if you built a much more
accurate computer for it that you could build a simulator which would simulate an airplane that had not yet
been built or at worst a modified airplane. See, they set all the controls on these things to make them act
pretty much like the airplane. But it was quite a step to ask for you to build a simulator that was good
enough so that you could evaluate the air flush performance. But this was the idea. So we got involved in
that, and the problem was how to build this computer. And we started out to build an analog computer
with ball disk integrators and similar things and gears and whatnot and…
Hendrie: With a lot of mechanical parts, a mechanical analog computer, not an electronic one?
Everett: Not really, not an electronic one. Although these things were all connected together by wires and
with little motors and things running things. And there were two problems, one is that you had to change it
to fit different kinds of aerodynamics and whatnot. So it had to be a much more flexible device, the other,
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