Excerpt from Digital Equipment co-founder's autobiography "Learn, Earn and Return"

The following is an excerpt from Digital Equipment co-founder Harlan Anderson's autobiography "Learn, Earn and Return," courtesy of Locust Press.

Read Network World's interview with Harlan Anderson.

It was July of 1952, and I had accepted MIT’s offer to come to work in their Digital Computer Lab, which at the time was part of the institute's Department of Electrical Engineering. It was widely known at the time that the lab was involved in the development of the Whirlwind Computer. Whirlwind, one of the first stored program digital computers, was similar to the ordvac—which I became familiar with while at the University of Illinois.

But in addition to Whirlwind, there was a lot happening at the Digital Computer Lab I was not told about because of military security. This was not the first time the U.S. military had come to MIT; there had earlier been an extensive and successful collaboration between MIT and the U.S. Department of Defense during World War II.

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One of these collaborative projects included the development of radar, which was a very successful joint effort between U.S. and U.K. scientists. MIT’s part in this collaboration was known as the Radiation Laboratory. Technical projects like this and those undertaken by other institutions, such as the development of the atomic bomb and the technical intelligence work that broke the German Enigma coding technique, demonstrated that science and technology were extremely important to military operations.

In short, the military appreciated the long-term role universities could play, and was willing to financially support them—even during peace time. MIT also benefited greatly from this relationship. The Office of Naval Research had paid for the development of the Whirlwind computer project to explore digital computers as an alternative to analog computers in simulating aircraft performance. Whirlwind was soon to take on a totally different role than that for which it had been created. This was a powerful testimonial to the versatility of computers.

This was the environment I was entering with my first engineering job. The initial phase of this ongoing venture with the military involved a “Project Charles” study to see if a computer based command and control tool could be developed to provide military personnel with real-time, comprehensive pictures of enemy aircraft based on information from multiple radar sets at various locations. This study had been going on for some time before I arrived. When it was successfully completed, a decision was made to implement a small scale version of this concept using the Whirlwind computer as the center of this system. This was known as the Cape Cod System.

The Cape Cod System involved the incorporation of existing radar sites in the general vicinity, as well as establishing digital communication lines to relay the radar information to Whirlwind, which was located in the Barta Building on the MIT campus. Computer programs were then written to convert the information into maps with aircraft locations that were presented to military operational personnel, who could then make decisions about what action should be taken against “enemy aircraft.” Such action included dispatching authentic military fighter planes from nearby Hanscom Field and other military bases to intercept real bombers flown by the Strategic Air Command acting as enemy aircraft set to attack the East Coast. The computer calculated the instructions to guide the fighter planes to a successful interception of the “enemy.”