About CSAIL

LCS/AI Lab Timeline

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First hand-drawn input to a computer (1954)

August? Ross wrote his name "Doug" freehand into the Whirlwind Computer with his finger.
Whirlwind never had a light pen, only light guns for close-up picking. One special scope, the Area Discriminator of the Cape Cod Air Defense prototype had full-screen view, with a photomultiplier on a tripod. Ross wrote a 200-line program to find and track a moving shadow, see Reference paper.
For: DFTI Digital Flight Test Instrumentation Project data-reduction programming.
Aim: Patch up bad/missing time-series data. Was demonstrated to many visitors, but was not needed when the Initial Data Processing Program, IDPP -- done by Oberlin classmate Ben Scheff, who joined Ross from National Security Agency ("NShA" in those days!) -- could "make a good run out of pure noise," it was so effective.
References:
Ross, D.T. 1986. "A personal view of the Personal Work Station -- Some firsts in the Fifties." In 1988. A. Goldberg (ed.), A History of Personal Workstations, New York: ACM Press, Addison -- Wesley Publishing Company, pp. 51-114.

Reported By:
Doug Ross