Today in 1918, Jay W. Forrester was born.
Forrester led the development of the Whirlwind, the first complete real-time computing system and was one of the inventors of magnetic-core memory which remained the computer memory technology of choice until the early 1970s. In 1956, he moved to MIT’s business school where he developed the field of system dynamics, computer modeling of complex systems.
Katie Hafner in the New York Times:
Professor Forrester abandoned digital computing in 1956, in part because he believed that the major innovations in the field had been made.
“I still stand by that,” he said in the 2011 interview. “More happened in percentage improvements in digital computers from 1946, when they didn’t exist, to 1956, when they came into the modern era. I might not have envisioned how much smaller and faster they’d be, but the fundamental logic hasn’t changed.”
One learns from Forrester’s obituary that he did not only think computer innovation peaked in 1956, but also did not have high regard for today’s engineers:
In the seven decades he was at M.I.T., Professor Forrester retained an engineer’s curiosity about how things work, and occasionally voiced dismay that his students were not always so inclined.
He recalled in 2011 that he once asked students in an engineering class if they understood how the feedback mechanism in a toilet’s water tank maintained the water level.
“I asked them, ‘How many of you have ever taken the lid off a toilet tank to see how it works?’” he recalled. “None of them had. How do you get to M.I.T. without having ever looked inside a toilet tank?”