Project Whirlwind Case History (Manuscript Edition)

YEAR: 1975
ITEM: Book
COMPANY: The Mitre Corporation
COUNTRY: USA
IN OUR COLLECTION: Yes

According to the preface this book was originally written by Redmond & Smith in 1967 for a project by the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian has planned a series of books that would examine the history of computer development, but they dropped the project and this manuscript lay forgotten. The president of Mitre Corporation decided to find an original copy of the manuscript and publish it for the sake of future historians and scholars.

The reason for this publication was that the president, Robert Everett, was celebrating the history of his own company. As he stated in the opening sentence of his Foreword,

It seems that the authors continued their research and followed this up with two other books: Project Whirlwind the History of a Pioneer Computer in 1980 and From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer in 2000.¹ Somewhere along the way, this original manuscript edition was forgotten.

Kuenzig Books, near Boston, is a specialty bookstore for science and tech related print materials. I hope to visit there someday! Kuenzig was selling a first edition of Redmond and Smith's 1980 book and made this comment at the end of their description of the 1980 book.
"While cataloged by most as a first edition (as we've done here) there was a manuscript edition that was written in 1967 by the authors with a grant from MITRE Corporation. The Smithsonian dropped the series where that manuscript was intended to be published, and so MITRE did a limited number of printings of the "Manuscript Edition" - Project Whirlwind, A Case History in Contemporary Technology, which technically predates this book both in publication date (Nov 1975) and content."

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