MIT Whirlwind

Whirlwind was a computer built at the tail end of World War II. It took us from an era of punch card batch processed computing and into the era of interactive computing. Sometimes the names we end up using for things evolve over time. Your memories are a bit different than computer memory. Computer memory is information that is ready to be processed.

Long term memory, well, we typically refer to that as storage. That’s where you put your files. Classes you build in Swift are loaded into memory at runtime. But that memory is volatile and we call it random-access memory now. This computer memory first evolved out of MIT with Whirlwind. And so they came up with what we now call magnetic-core memory in 1955.

Why did they need speeds faster than a vacuum tube? Well, it turns out vacuum tubes burn out a lot. And the flip-flop switching they do was cool for payroll. But not for tracking Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in real time and reacting to weather patterns so you can make s