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Curator’s Introduction
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As an introduction to the Walter MacWilliams Oral
History, the following commentary provides useful background and context
for this historic transistor work.
See [1] for additional related
material.
Walter H. Mac Williams, Jr. joined Bell Labs in January
1946, after five years of Navy service in research and development of
antiaircraft fire control equipment.
His initial work at Bell Labs was a continuation of the so-called
Mark 65 program, which was a broad-based study of the defense of a
combatant ship, armed with 5”/38 gun mounts, against a coordinated air
attack, involving attack speeds expected to exist in 1960, then 15 years
into the future.
The integrated defense system evolved represented the
developing air attack as track-while-scan data from the ship’s air search
radar, assigning gun directors (with their associated computers generating
data for firing the defensive 5”/38 gun mounts), and issuing orders for
firing the guns, taking into account the relative threats of the incoming
aircraft and the firing clearance of the guns as the ship undertakes
evasive maneuvers. The system
included a tactical display with controls for making the assignments
manually as a keyboard operation, simplifying the making of air-defense
decisions.
With the higher speeds of incoming aircraft the
already-tight period for making defense assignments would be further
compressed.
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Curator’s Introduction
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Could the tightened time available for making defense
decisions be countered by making a computer-controlled defense? Hence a defense calculus was developed,
whereby the dynamic threats represented by the incoming aircraft and the
quantized effectiveness of defensive gunfire from available gun mounts could
be used to make assignment decisions automatically. This is believed to be the first such
reduction of an air defense operation to computer control.
Among the questions that arose naturally were, “How
effective could a computer-controlled defense be?”, and “How effective
would the computer-controlled defense be, compared to the defense made by
human operators using the sophisticated display and assignment facilities?”
To address these questions, he proposed the
construction of a Gunnery System Simulator, which could run simulated
attack and defenses – both manual and automatic - against them. A Gunnery System Simulator was duly
designed, which represented the dynamics of the simulated attack and
defense. One of the components of the simulator was the Gun-to-p-computer
Switch, which allowed taking into account the statistical effectiveness of
individual gun shots, including the effect of firing from more than one gun
mount. This Gun-to-p-computer
Switch was implemented with point contact transistors, which had just
become available as pre-production samples.
Go
To MacWilliams Curator's Introduction, Pg 2
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