Recovering Software for the Whirlwind Computer

The late 1940s were seminal years in the development of electronic digital computing machines, as researchers began to realize the enormous potential held by these machines. One of these new generations of computing devices was the vacuum-tube Whirlwind computer, designed in the late 1940s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Designed from the start for real-time control applications, Whirlwind evolved to be a key element in a proof of concept for national air defense. The article starts with a review of Whirlwind and its evolving software environment, goes on to describe the current effort to decode some of the Whirlwind software artifacts remaining in museum archives, and then describes some of the material the work has made accessible, allowing us to further study some of the software developed during that formative decade.