Link: Section 2: The emergence of computer graphics.
The evolution of the digital computer continued with the Whirlwind computer. Development of the Whirlwind began in 1945 under the leadership of Jay Forrester at MIT, as part of the Navy's Airplane Stability and Control Analyzer (ASCA) project. The system was proposed in order to provide a "programmable" flight simulation environment and was first demonstrated in 1951. This was not the first digital computer, but it was the first capable of displaying real time text and graphics on a large oscilloscope screen.
Whirlwind received positional data related to an aircraft from a radar station in Massachusetts. The Whirlwind programmers had created a series of data points, displayed on the screen, that represented the eastern coast of Massachusetts, and when data was received from radar, a symbol representing the aircraft was superimposed over the geographic drawing on the screen of a CRT. Robert Everett (who later became CEO of Mitre Corporation) designed an input device, which was called a light gun or light pen, to give the operators a way of requesting identification information about the aircraft. When the light gun was pointed at the symbol for the plane on the screen, an event was sent to Whirlwind, which then sent text about the plane's identification, speed and direction to also be displayed on the screen (see photo of military officer using the light pen on a SAGE computer in photo below right).
