21 Jun
2018
21 Jun
'18
2:11 a.m.
> Yet late in his life Forrester told me that
the Whirlwind-connected
> invention he was most proud of was marginal testing
I'm totally gobsmacked to hear that. Margin
testing was
important, yes, but not even remotely on the same quantum
level as core.
In trying to understand why he said that, I can only
suppose that he felt that
core was 'the work of many hands'...and so he only deserved a share of the
`credit for it.
It is indeed a striking comment. Forrester clearly had grave concerns
about the reliability of such a huge aggregation of electronics. I think
jpl gets to the core of the matter, regardless of national security:
Whirlwind ... was tube based, and I think there was a
tradeoff of speed,
as determined by power, and tube longevity. Given the purpose, early
warning of air attack, speed was vital, but so, too, was keeping it alive.
So a means of finding a "sweet spot" was really a matter of national
security. I can understand Forrester's pride in that context.
If you extrapolate the rate of replacement of vacuum tubes in a 5-tube
radio to a 5000-tube computer (say nothing of the 50,000-tube machines
for which Whirlwind served as a prototype), computing looks like a
crap shoot. In fact, thanks to the maintenance protocol, Whirlwind
computed reliably--a sine qua non for the nascent industry.