Talk:Whirlwind I

message: Nobody calls this thing "MIT Whirlwind". It's always just plain "Whirlwind", and the context make it obvious that it's not the aeroynmaic event. 
I'll do a stub disambig page from "Whirlwind", indicating the aerodynamic event, and linking here.
Noel 20:08, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Nobody calls this thing "MIT Whirlwind"

message: Two things on this section:
* It mentions only Ken Olsen, and claim he "led" the TX-0 effort.  I believe Was Clark was the lead on the TX-0 design, and at least should be mentioned.
* It mentions that TX-1 came after TX-0, was "too ambitious" and was scaled back to  the TX-2.  However, The Dream Machine claims that TX-1 was the original proposal for a "Whirlwind with transistors", was nixed, TX-0 done in its place, and that TX-2 was then used as name for the follow-up to TX-0.  Anyone know the facts here?
** The claim that Whirlwind is the predecessor of TX-0, or for that matter that TX-0 and friends are the predecessor of the PDP-1, seems quite a stretch.  Those other machines are 18 bit machines.  And a 2 minute inspection of the relevant manuals reveals that (a) the Whirlwind instruction set is nothing like that of TX-0, (b) the TX-0 instruction set is nothing like that of the PDP-1. Paul Koning (talk) 18:31, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  What came of the Whirlwind? 

message: Rationale: Duplicate subjects
The new article Information Technology: At the dawn of the computer age is about Whirlwind, including many claimed firsts for Whirlwind and an enumeration of later projects that are said to have benefited from Whirlwind.  There is no Wikipedia user benefit from a 2nd Whirlwind article; the Whirlwind details should be merged into the existing Whirlwind article (a 60th or 26th or ... anniversary is not justification for a redundant article). 
btw, the many claims of "firsts" in that article should not be merged into the Whirlwind article, but instead should be placed on this talk page together with the suggestion that anyone moving those claims to the article also add explicit, non-controversial, references for each claim moved.  69.106.238.70 (talk) 05:08, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

message: I'm wondering about the statement "...and indirectly to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960s." I don't think you're required to cite things in the summary, but that's a pretty broad statement, and how it influenced this development is not mentioned or clarified later in the article (only how it affected SAGE). Wolverine00000 (talk) 23:30, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV?, citable facts in summary?

message: The infobox says that the building is now called N42. However both floorplans.mit.edu and whereis.mit.edu say that such building doesn't exist. I can only find 3 mentions of N42 building: this Wikipedia article, draft blueprints for the building from 1996, and an old news article from 1998.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.36.231.82 (talk) 22:13, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  N42 

message: The origin of the hexadecimal ABCDEF letters is typically attributed to IBM (though we are still searching for a reliable reference for this), but I found the following comment in an old archived thread of the hexadecimal talk page:
:IBM certainly was not the first to use A-F.  Such was in use from the late 1940's through the late 1950's at MIT's Wirlwind Project - a 16 bit binary computer - I joined the project in 1952.
:[...]
:—Preceding unsigned comment added by Kp2a (talk • contribs) 16:31, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin of hexadecimal notation using ABCDEF? 

message: === Operation ===
A number of tests have been run without error for hours at a time in 1949 (32 registers of test storage) and in 1950 (electrostatic storage).
In January-March 1951 Whirlwind has been operating usefully about 30 hours a week (with satisfactory operation about 85% of the time). From April it was 35 hours a week (about 90% trouble-free).
From March/April 1952 the number of hours was Increased from 30, through 50, to about 70 hours in June. From August average weekly operation time increased to 99 hours (85% useful time).--89.25.210.104 (talk) 22:46, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Operation time stats according to DIGITAL COMPUTER NEWSLETTER 

message: A number of tests have been run without error for hours at a time in 1949 (32 registers of test storage) and in 1950 (electrostatic storage).
In January-March 1951 Whirlwind has been operating usefully about 30 hours a week (with satisfactory operation about 85% of the time). From April it was 35 hours a week (about 90% trouble-free).
From March/April 1952 the number of hours was Increased from 30, through 50, to about 70 hours in June. From August average weekly operation time increased to 99 hours (85% useful time).--89.25.210.104 (talk) 22:46, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Operation 

message: The "Records" box near the bottom has no sources and doesn't link to anything related to its topic.  E.g. "Fastest computer in the world" ends up as a link to "Mainframe Computers" which isn't at all the same thing and which doesn't mention or involve Whirlwind at all.  While it might be fun "original research" to make such a list, or to find sources for such a list, this thread of random unsourced claims across the bottom of multiple articles doesn't seem to be a good idea in its current form.  Gnuish (talk) 22:25, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that there used to be an article about the fastest computer through history, but it must not be there now.  Other articles have this, for instance IBM NORC.  It is probably useless to link to the mainframe article, unless it has a section about it. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 22:54, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Records" box at bottom of article 

message: I don't know if any of this belongs in the article, but I'm one of the very few (perhaps the only) living people who actually wrote and executed a program on Whirlwind.
I graduated from MIT in 1956.My senior thesis was on linear programming, and as part of it I wrote a program for Whirlwind.  (I don't remember what that program actually did). I prepared it on paper tape that I generated on a Flexowriter. Whirlwind was visually very impressive; lots of flashing lights and clacking sounds. When a program aborted, the programmers would take a picture of the machine tom capture the contents of the registers. Paul Abrahams (talk) 02:49, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical recollection