MIT’s Whirlwind & Forrester

Home / NMM@Boston / MIT’s Whirlwind & Forrester

A Sequence of Actions
Edward O. Thorp Gallery
MIT Museum
Gambrill Center
314 Main St
Cambridge, MA 02142

MIT Museum Sign

A Sequence of Actions - Whirlwind Display at MIT Museum

Whirlwind I, MIT Museum

MIT Whirlwind

Whrilwind Exhibit Information - MIT Museum

WATCH

Poster for talk by Jay Forrester about Whirlwind Computer
The Computer Museum, Boston, June 2, 1980

While located in Boston, The Computer Museum hosted a series of lectures entitled Computer Pioneers, and posters were created as advertisements. A set of them were given to Mary Hopper by Brian Silverman, and they serve as the basis for the New Media Museum’s exhibit Pioneers Posters. The above is a photo of one of the posters, and a video of the talk is on YouTube.

Jay Forrester on the Whirlwind Computer (Computer History Museum, YouTube Video)

Experiment with running a simulation of Whirlwind!

Simulator for 1950’s MIT Whirlwind Computer (Guy Fedorkow, GitHub)

READ

Whirlwind Core Memory Unit (MIT Museum)
Project Whirlwind Finding Aids and Reports (MIT Libraries)

The Whirlwind Computer (The Computer Museum)
Whirlwind: Preparing the Way for SAGE (Computer History Museum)

The Rise and Fall of Project Whirlwind (Meesue Kim, MIT Computation Archives)

Whirlwind Computer (Michael R. Swaine & Paul A. Freiberger, Encyclopædia Britannica)
Whirlwind I (Wikipedia)

The Many Careers of Jay Forrester (Peter Dizikes, MIT Technology Review)
Jay W. Forrester (Computer History Museum)

Jay Wright Forrester (Encyclopædia Britannica)
Jay Wright Forrester (Wikipedia)

EXPLORE

See the rest of the posters and learn more about modern computer history by exploring the New Media Museum’s Pioneers Posters Exhibit.