1962 - 2022 THERE WERE COMPUTERS


The Army’s urgent wartime need created the computer indus- try in the mid-20th century. Can it pull another rabbit out of a hat to address today’s sof tware acquisition challenges?


by Steve Stark D 114


uring World War II, the Army had an intractable problem that required a novel solution: New weap- ons that needed firing tables were coming online, but the process for creating the tables was so labo-


rious that the human brains that calculated them couldn’t keep up. From that need, the mid-20th century’s computer industry was born. Now the Army faces different challenges in software acquisition.


In “Gigantic Computer Industry Sired by Army’’s World War Needs,” from the December 1963-January 1964 edition of Army Research and Development, the predecessor to Army AL&T, Daniel Marder and W. D. Dickinson, wrote that “Today’s multi- billion [sic] dollar computer industry …was spawned as a result of the U.S. Army’s urgent need for enormous amounts of firing tables and other ballistic data during World War II.” At the time, Dickinson was assistant to the director of the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratories at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, part of the Army Research Office.


Weapons that lobbed munitions far beyond what a Soldier could see were difficult to aim. Firing tables were the solution. Tey consisted of calculations that considered the weight of the muni- tion, the power of the propellant and the angle of the howitzer, for example, and told how to set the weapon before firing. Figur- ing all that meant a lot of calculations—for human computers.


SOFTWARE-FREE COMPUTERS To relieve considerable backlogs, a group at the U.S. Army Ballis- tic Research Laboratories (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, led by the officer-in-charge of computations, Lt. Col. Paul N. Gillon, set out to “revolutionize methods of calculations.” BRL, “in addition to its own Bush Differential Analyzer, had been using another ‘Bush machine’ at the University of Pennsylva- nia,” according to the article.


Vannevar Bush had invented the differential analyzer in the 1920s, and it was a mechanical computer that computed digits by means of mechanics similar to the way that adding machines


BEFORE SOFTWARE,


Army AL&T Magazine


Summer 2022


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