MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
From Feedback to Computing: a History of Control Systems
David Mindell
Program in Science, Technology and Society, MIT
Monday, March 31, 1997
4:00 PM
Edgerton Hall, Room 34-101
EECS Colloquium
Abstract
This talk examines feedback and its role in computers and information
systems from 1916 to 1945. During this period, traditional methods of
designing regulators and governors formalized into a theory of control which
understood feedback as isomorphic across several disciplines. Yet these
ideas evolved differently in different institutions and engineering
contexts. The talk examines four such institutions, one industrial (the
Sperry Company; automatic pilots and computers), one academic (MIT; Vannevar
Bush, his students and the Differential Analyzer ), one military (the Naval
Bureau of Ordnance; its contractors, the Ford Instrument Company, Arma, and
G.E.), and one industrial research (Bell Labs; Black, Nyquist, Bode and
telephone amplifiers). Engineers in each worked with distinct concepts of
system, feedback, stability, control, and the human role in operating
technical systems.
These four threads came together during World War II under Vannevar Bush's
National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). A subsection of the NDRC,
devoted to the problem of antiaircraft fire control, subsumed much of the
pre-war work in control systems and let contracts which developed a broad
array of automatic controls, systems, and theory. These included gun
directors, predictors, radar-controlled devices, and psychological models of
human operators. Diverse notions of systems and control conflicted and fused
amid the frenetic and creative atmosphere of wartime technology. Several
important contributors to early computing, including John Atanasoff, Jay
Forrester, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and George Stibitz participated
in this wartime work. From NDRC-sponsored control research emerged a new
synthesis of control theory, important steps toward modern digital
computers, and early system engineering. The talk places these developments
within larger histories of relationships between machines and people,
engineers and the state, technology and culture.
URL of this page:
http://www-eecs.mit.edu/AY96-97/events/30.html
Created: Mar 20, 1997
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Modified: Jun 24, 1997
This announcement is from the MIT EECS 1996-97 archive.
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