🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <50...@convex.convex.com>, da...@convex.com (Anthony A. Datri) writes:
> As I noted here a while ago, "When Worlds Collide" had a "Bush [Busch?]
> Differential Anaylzer", which was an actual analog computer done by
> Vannevar Bush [double sp?].  I believe MIT had one, as well an Army
> lab that used it for ballistics stuff.  Notice how many of these early
> machines (like ENIAC) were used for ballistics?

The Army lab in question was the same for both machines, Aberdeen
Proving Ground Ballistic Research Labs.  You can see a picture of
BRL's Differential Analyzer in Burk's From ENIAC to the Stored-Program
Computer in [pp 322] Metropolis, Howlett, and Rotta's A History of Computing in
the Twentieth Century (Academic Press, 1980).  In the same volume is Eckert's
article The Eniac which on page 530 relates:

    In January 1944, we were very well aware that the ENIAC had some good
    generality and tht it had some poor generality.  It tooks hours to set
    the original unmodified version but it was better than the Bush 
    Differential Analyzer that usually took days to set up with screwdrivers
    and lead hammers and so on.  MIT was concerned about this, and so built a
    Bush-type analyzer at MIT, which was interconnected with relays and servos
    rather than shafts and could be set up rather quickly.  It could at
    that time be set up morre quickly than our ENIAC as originally
    used or our old-style Bush-type analyzer.

Svoboda's Computing Mechanisms and Linkages, which was originally part of
the Radiation Laboratory Series published by McGraw-Hill in 1948 but
later released in paperback form and generally available in libraries,
is a goldmine of technigues for putting together mechanical analyzers
(Svoboda also has an interesting article in the A History of ... book
referred to above).

Of course, once you got a working computer, you ran it for all it was
worth.  Indeed, as late as October 1954, we find in the ONR Digital
Computer Newsletter supplemment to the Journal of the Association
for Computing Machinery, we find Aberdeen Proving Ground reporting 
productivity statistics on their three high-speed computers: ORDVAC,
EDVAC, and ENIAC.  If it hadn't burned down the next year, who knows
how long the ENIAC would have kept grinding out ballistics
calculations (with occasional forays into decimal expansions of pi
and other problems).

--- BOB (web...@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)