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Accelerators were big machines a country could brag about, and the Cold
War foes liked to show them off. Not wanting to fall behind the super-powers,
several European countries collaborated and built the biggest of them all at
the new Counseil European pour la Recherche Nucleaire, or CERN.
The same research center where the World Wide Web would be invented forty
years later.
All this building was wonderful for the economies devastated from
the war, but the scars of international conflict were still fresh in their
minds. The United Nations was created as a grand experiment in preventing
another global war. New York was picked to host the United Nations, and
construction began on a UN Building for the hundreds of UN ambassadors and
their staff.
Three acoustic engineers, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, formed
a partnership to work as consultants on the new UN Building. Their new
company, BBN, was headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts near the
engineers' alma mater, MIT. From there they recruited students from MIT
and Harvard. BBN was soon known as the "third university in Cambridge."
Whirlwind
One of the biggest radar projects at MIT was Whirlwind, an early
application of computers to coordinate and monitor a collection of radars
watching for Russian bombers flying over the north pole. Several
staff and graduate students (including Frank Heart) worked on a computer
system that would alert a central monitoring station when something showed
up on the radar. It was one of the first uses of computer networking and
it pushed the technology to new levels.
Copyright © 1998, PBS Online,
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