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Curious? MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections Object of the Month:Project WhirlwindWondering about the picture on our home page? Here's the full image: 
MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections tells us: The development of Whirlwind I, one of the first large-scale high-speed computers, began during World War II as part of a research project to design a universal flight trainer that would simulate flight (the Aircraft Stability and Control Analyzer project). Initiated by the Office of Naval Research, the project began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Servomechanisms Laboratory in 1944. Eventually the focus of the grant, a flight simulator (using an analog computer), changed to the development of a high-speed digital computer. While building the computer, Jay W. Forrester invented random-access, coincident-current magnetic storage, which became the standard memory device for digital computers, replacing electrostatic tubes. Read more, and see more images, at the MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections Project Whirlwind pages.
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