Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
not computationally sufficient for
time constrained processing because
they could not continually operate on
continually changing input.
Whirlwind also required much more
speed than typical computational
systems. The design of this highspeed
stored-program computer was
completed by 1947 and 175 people
started construction in 1948. The
system was completed in three years,
when the U.S. Air Force picked it up
because the Navy had lost interest,
renaming it Project Claude. This machine was too slow and improvements were
implemented to increase performance. The initial machine used Williams tubes, cathode
ray tubes that were used to store electronic data, which were unreliable and slow.
Forrester expanded on the work of An Wang, who created the pulse transfer-controlling
device in 1949. The product was magnetic core memory (upper left), which permanently
stores binary data on tiny donut shaped magnets strung together by a wire grid. This
approximately doubled the memory speed of the new machine, completed in 1953.
Whirlwind was the world’s first real-time computer and the first computer to use the
cathode ray tube, which at this time was a large oscilloscope screen, as a video monitor
for an output device.
The new machine was used in the
Semi Automated Ground
Environment (SAGE), which was
manufactured by IBM and became
operational in 1958. The picture on
the right shows a SAGE terminal.
This system coordinated a complex
system of radar, telephone lines,
radio links, aircraft and ships. It
could identify and detect aircraft
when they entered U.S. airspace.
SAGE was contained in a 40,000
square foot area for each two-system
installation, had 30,000 vacuum
tubes, had a 4k by 32-bit word magnetic drum memory and used 3 megawatts of power.
In 1958, the Whirlwind project was also extended to include an air traffic control system.
The last Whirlwind-based SAGE computer was in service until 1983. xxiii
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