Archival History of Computing at MIT, 1950–62

The MIT Digital Humanities Programs, together with the MIT Libraries Department of Distinctive Collections, have digitized and contextualized the majority of archived documents relating to the history of the MIT Computation Center from the 1950s and early 1960s.
Try searching for: Humanities | Whirlwind | Laura | Social science research | Calvin | 704 | Physics
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Computing in the 1930s - A Geospatial Timeline A tour and timeline of notable events in the early history of computation.
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Beginnings of CS at MIT Today, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is the biggest department at MIT, and the CS portion makes up the majority of it. To many, it would seem like this has always been the way of MIT, but that was not the case. CS at MIT is a rather recent development that had humble beginnings.
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“Three Man-Months” One might presume that the primary issue with the computers of the 1950’s was that they were slow. But lack of processing power was not necessarily the bottleneck here.
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The Rise and Fall of Project Whirlwind The development of the Whirlwind Project serves as a milestone in the computation history, as it was one of the first high-speed large-scale digital computers to be developed. However, there were many issues during the process of perfecting the machine that ended in its termination in 1959.
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Women in Symbols Although women’s contributions to the MIT Computation Center are not very visible in this archive’s external lab communications, some internal documents shed light on a piece of their work.
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Digital Humanities: An Enduring Legacy A time without digital humanities is a time long before commercial computers. Even at its earliest, when the hours of computation were meticulously counted and rationed, the investment of technology in the humanities thrived.