COMPUTERS & MILITARY by Elliot Chibe HISTORY ➤ Alan Turing - Enigma (1939) ➤ ENIAC ➤ Whirlwind I military computer (1950) The U. S. Army is credited with initiating the computer revolution. Few inventions have had as big an impact on our civilization as the computer, and all modern computers are descended from ENIAC, EDVAC, ORDVAC, and BRLESC -- all of which were conceived of and built to address pressing Army needs. ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory,[5][6] its first programs included a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon. In December 1939, Turing solved the essential part of the naval indicator system, which was more complex than the indicator systems used by the other services.[69][70] That same night he also conceived of the idea of Banburismus, a sequential statistical technique (what Abraham Wald later called sequential analysis) to assist in breaking naval Enigma The complex histories of computer science and computer engineering were shaped, in the first decades of digital computing, almost entirely by military funding. Most of the basic component technologies for digital computing were developed through the course of the long-running Whirlwind-SAGE program to develop an automated radar shield. The 1960s saw large mainframe computers become much more common in large industries and with the US military and space program. PROBLEMS FOR SOCIETY ➤ Ethical dilemmas ➤ Errors could cause human fatalities ➤ Hacking PROBLEM SOLVING Safeguards and good-practices “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. -Albert Einstein SOURCES ➤ http://homepage.cs.uri.edu/faculty/wolfe/book/Readings/ Reading03.htm ➤ http://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html ➤ http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the- computer/4/78 ➤ http://tracyreed.org/Writings/military ➤ http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj04/ spr04/phister.html .