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With the emergence of the Cold War, military support for comput-
ers would continue to be of paramount importance. The fi rst problem
programmed onto the ENIAC (in November 1945) was a mathematical
model of the hydrogen bomb. 9 As the confl ict deepened, the military
found uses for computers in aiming and operating weapons, weapons
engineering, radar control, and the coordination of military operations.
Computers like MIT's Whirlwind (1951) and SAGE (Semi-Automatic
Ground Environment, 1959) were the fi rst to be applied to what became
known as C 3 I: command, control, communications, and intelligence. 10
What implications did the military involvement have for computer
design? Most early computers were designed to solve problems involv-
ing large sets of numbers. Firing tables are the most obvious example.
Other problems, like implosion, also involved the numerical solution
of differential equations. 11 A large set of numbers—representing an ap-
proximate solution—would be entered into the computer; a series of
computations on these numbers would yield a new, better approxima-
tion. A solution could be approached iteratively. Problems such as radar
control also involved (real-time) updating of large amounts of data fed
in from remote military installations. Storing and iteratively updating
large tables of data was the exemplary computational problem.
Another fi eld that quickly took up the use of digital electronic com-
puters was physics, particularly the disciplines of nuclear and particle
physics. The military problems described above belonged strictly to the
domain of physics. Differential equations and systems of linear algebraic
equations can describe a wide range of physical phenomena such as fl uid
fl ow, diffusion, heat transfer, electromagnetic waves, and radioactive
decay. In some cases, techniques of military computing were applied
directly to physics problems. For instance, missile telemetry involved
problems of real-time, multichannel communication that were also use-
ful for controlling bubble chambers. 12 A few years later, other physicists
realized that computers could be used to great effect in “logic” ma-
chines: spark chambers and wire chambers that used electrical detectors
rather than photographs to capture subatomic events. Bubble chambers
and spark chambers were complicated machines that required careful
coordination and monitoring so that the best conditions for recording
events could be maintained by the experimenters. By building comput-
ers into the detectors, physicists were able to retain real-time control
over their experimental machines. 13
But computers could be used for data reduction as well as control.
From the early 1950s, computers were used to sort and analyze bubble
chamber fi lm and render the data into a useful form. One of the main
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