The arrival of Endeavor (hardware) is only half the story! The rest of the story is Information Technology (software) and the founding of the computer age. They are twins. Both were funded by the federal government and initiated at MIT.

The first electronic full-time computer with memory was Whirlwind funded by the Navy in the ‘40s and ‘50s for the SAGE early warning system during the Cold War. Whirlwind progeny gave rockets guidance.

Watertown High School graduate Bill Wolf took Whirlwind home with him to use in his NASA R&D contract to perfect the algorithms of satellites and the first moon landing. It was built from vacuum tubes, had 200 KW of power and weighed 71 tons. He took it out of the Barta Building at MIT with a crane.

Life magazine in two editions dedicated to the moon landing (Sept. 25/Oct. 4, 1964) cited Bill as the “Young Wizard of Computers.” Subsequently, Bill created the information technology product industry, the industry of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle and a host of others, by litigating IBM and separating software from hardware.

Recently Bill sold to Intellectual Ventures his patent to expedite software programming by 10 times using computers.

David Graf

Garden Grove, Calif.

Thousands of readers like you have made Northern New York Newspapers the number one ranked website* for local news and sports coverage in the north country.

You can continue on to this article in a few seconds, or you can visit one of our websites:

• Watertown Daily Times
• The Ogdensburg Journal
• Daily Courier-Observer