Twenty-five ways in which MIT has transformed computing
This month MIT is celebrating the launch of the new $1 billion MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. To help commemorate the event, here’s a list of 25 ways in which MIT has already transformed the world of computing technology. 1937: Digital circuits Master’s student Claude Shannon showed that the principles of true/false logic could be used to represent the on-off states of electric switches — a concept that served as the foundation of the field of digital circuits, and, therefore, the entire industry of digital computing itself. 1944: The digital computer The first digital computer that could operate in real-time came out of Project Whirlwind, a initiative during World War II in which MIT worked with the U.S. Navy to develop a universal flight simulator. The device’s success led to the creation of MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1951. 1945: Memex Professor Vannevar Bush proposed a data system called a “Memex” that would allow...