Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer
Larry Owens · Technology and Culture · 1986
One day in 1942, the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer was dedicated to winning the war. For the next several years this large mathematical machine, the centerpiece of MIT's Center of Analysis, labored over the calculation of firing tables and the profiles of radar antennas.' Weighing almost a hundred tons and comprising some two thousand vacuum tubes, several thousand relays, a hundred and fifty motors, and automated input units, the analyzer was the most important computer in existence in the United States at the end of the war.2 (See fig. 1.) Wartime security prohibited its public announcement until