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PROFILE: Jay W. Forrester

Jay W. Forrester: Electrical engineer laid foundation for modern personal computer

Copyright © 2004 by E. A. Kral

One of the major inventors in American history, Jay W. Forrester was the leader of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1956, credited not only with being a pioneer in the early development of the digital computer but also for laying the foundation of the modern personal computer.

As organizer of Project Whirlwind, funded under government contract, Forrester had to develop a flight-simulator with responses in real time for training pilots. Since an analog computer was not fast enough, he consulted with others, including University of Pennsylvania designers of the computer ENIAC, then embarked on a digital computer development program.

With a staff of 175 persons and an annual budget of $1 million, he improved the lifespan of vacuum tubes, but had to solve the problem of information storage. So in 1949 he invented a magnetic core memory in a three-dimensional array which allowed for high reliability and high speed at a lower cost.

His random-access, coincident-current magnetic storage technology was first used in a business computer marketed by IBM in 1955. And it became the standard memory device for digital computers until it was replaced in the mid-1970s by semiconductor memory chips.

Whirlwind was operational in 1951, and it proved its value to the military by running aircraft simulators, aiming missiles, and identifying hostile aircraft. Within two years it could track and identify 48 aircraft at the same time.

So it was employed for the highly advanced air defense system of the United States and fully implemented in 1958, performing its mission for another 25 years. And the military's production of a standard operator's console evolved into a modern desktop computer environment years later.

Whirlwind was also the world's first general-purpose real-time computer, reported an article in the December 2001 Scientific American, and individuals used it like a personal computer, sitting at the cathode-ray-tube display where they could "write code, run simulations or just play around" during short sessions.

To date, some one billion personal computers have been purchased worldwide, and they are now a strong competitor for television as far as leisure time spent at home.

From 1956 to 1989, Forrester devoted his career at MIT to creating system dynamics in the field of management as a way to combine practical knowledge about structure and policies in social systems with computer simulation to explain behavior, including an understanding of the national economy. Basically, it is a process for showing how alternative policies affect growth, stability, fluctuation, and changing behavior in corporations, cities, and countries.

He has been accorded many honors from various institutions and organizations, including election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1967 and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame at Akron, Ohio in 1979.

His place in history has also been assured with a biographical entry in Notable Twentieth Century Scientists, Vol 2 (Gale, 1995).

Born in 1918 on a cattle ranch west of Anselmo, Custer County, Nebraska to Marmaduke and Ethel Wright Forrester, he attended a one-room country school, and during high school at Anselmo, where he graduated in 1935, he designed a wind-driven electric plant that furnished power for the family home.

Jay W. Forrester earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1939, finishing first in his class. After departing the state to engage in graduate work and various projects at MIT, he completed his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1945.

Since then, he and his wife have lived in the Boston area, where they raised three children. Among his many honorary degrees is a doctor of science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1954.

For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.beatricene.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.