Browsing by Author "Ross, Douglas T."
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Oral history interview with Douglas T. Ross(Charles Babbage Institute, 1984-02-21) Ross, Douglas T.; Aspray, WilliamRoss, the founder of SofTech Corporation, recounts some of his early experiences working on MIT's Whirlwind computer in the 1950s. He explains how a summer job at MIT's Servomechanisms Laboratory operating a Marchant calculator led him to use the Whirlwind for greater computing power--and to seventeen years in the MIT computer labs. Ross reports on his first use of Whirlwind for airborne fire control problems. Soon after that the Whirlwind was used for the Cape Cod early warning system, a precursor to the SAGE Air Defense System. Ross describes improvements made to Whirlwind, including the introduction of the first light pen and the replacement of the paper tape reader with a photoelectric tape reader (PETR). Ross also discusses some of the programs he wrote or used on Whirlwind, such as the Initial Data Processing Program (IDPP), the Servo Lab Utility Program (SLURP), and the Mistake Diagnosis Routine (MDR). He describes the IDPP as particularly interesting, because it involved pattern recognition and was thus an early example of artificial intelligence research.Item Oral history interview with Douglas T. Ross(Charles Babbage Institute, 1989-11-01) Ross, Douglas T.Ross begins with a discussion of his early involvement with John Ward on the Cape Cod project and his early experimentation in gestalt programming with Air Force and Emerson Electric Company programmers on the 1103 at Eglin Air Force Base. He then talks about the work he directed for the Air Force under Frank Reintjes at the MIT laboratories. He discusses the APT (Automatically Programmed Tools) and AED (Automated Engineering Design) projects which were early precursors of the languages and systems of modern CAD and CAM systems. Although these projects were not supported directly by DARPA, they were run in close connection with the WHIRLWIND, TX-0, TX-2, Project MAC, and CTSS projects that were running simultaneously at MIT. Ross discusses his use of programmers from industry in these projects. He also mentions the distribution of APT through the Fortran Monitor System and discusses the relationship between AED and PL-1.