Also see the much larger digital archive of Whirlwind documents https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/1157/...

My read on this is that Whirlwind was radical because it was 16 bit parallel. Previously anything to get a compute machine working would do, and bit serial is pretty natural. This one was designed from the get-go for speed.

I think it's even more than that - it birthed SAGE and many other descendants. The wild thing is how readable and recognizable the ISA is. Someone ought to build an emulator...

Love the Whirlwind! i think of it as the original microcontroller, except not very micro of course. The 2kw address space is a bit small for bigger programs unfortunately, but it's still great fun to play with anyways.

The SAGE computers were scaled up versions of the MIT Whirlwind I.

Later, the transistorized TX-0 and TX-2 computers were based on the MIT Whirlwind I. The DEC PDP-1 was based on the TX-2.

Two years after this booklet, the CRT memory it describes was replaced by core memory (becoming the first computer to use that technology).

Indeed, for those interested, the Whirlwind archives include a lot of details on Jay Forrester's core memory, as well.

Not implying whirlwind is the ur-machine, or originated terms of art, just noting that a lot of language in 1951 could be understood to apply in a domain-specific sense to a modern computer scientist: the jargon we use now, includes terms of art that these people use.

They are therefore at least 75 years old.

It kind of was, at least enough so to be an IEEE Milestone https://ethw.org/Milestones:Whirlwind_Computer,_1944-59

The booklet looks great.