"In the faint pre-dawn glow of the Digital Age--the mid- to late-1940s--computers had much in common with Jurassic dinosaurs: large in body but very short on brainpower. Staggering behemoths of hardware most were about the size of a gymnasium yet with barely a fraction of the capability of a modern desktop PC.
"Hardly anyone gave much thought to
a computer doing anything more than munching huge quantities of numbers
and then slowly regurgitating an answer. Hardly anyone, that is,
except for a bunch of bright boys
at 211 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, an old, redbrick former laundry building dating back to 1904, just a stone’s throw from the front door of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"It became quite evident very quickly that the bright boys were not only adept at fashioning new technology but had a distinct knack for making history as well. Their technical exploits are hands-down one of the truly great stories in American engineering. They not only made the impossible possible for the skies over North America, but in the process ushered in the military’s long sought after yet previously elusive prize, real-time command and control. And as if that wasn’t enough of a success, they poked a gaping hole in the future and dragged into being the modern world of Information Technology.
"The profusion of technological firsts that they introduced, many of which remained as industry standards for decades thereafter, is as yet unmatched in any single engineering project since. And equally astounding, they showed the world that a digital computer could and should do much more than just count."
