Jay Wright Forrester (1918-2016)
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>1950s</strong></span></p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Profiles in Operations Research: Jay Wight Forrester</em> (2011):</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">There he met the Princeton mathematician John von Neumann, who was helping to design the Moore School’s next generation computer, the EDVAC, and J. Presper Eckert, one of the developers of the ENIAC. These visits convinced Jay that the ASCA project would be based on digital computation, a bold decision given that all existing digital computers were far too slow and limited to meet the requirements of ASCA. As director (from 1951) of the MIT digital computer laboratory, Jay led the development of the Whirlwind computer, which was, for years, the only machine fast enough for real-time simulation of complex dynamical systems such as an aircraft.</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Whirlwind became the central element of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system and became the first computer produced in volume. SAGE was built to defend North America from Soviet bomber attack and consisted of a network of digital computers and long-distance communication systems that sent target tracking information from radar stations to computers. The Whirlwind-based computers in each center processed the data and computed flight plans for interceptor aircraft and missiles, a demanding real-time application requiring high reliability.</p>