136 Dahlgren 



contractor who has a console in her house. She dials in here to use the comput- 

 er. So that's the big difference in the use of computers. 



Getting a little more technical, there's another concept coming along called 

 "virtual" computers. The hardware is not much different from the computers 

 we have today, but it is designed in such a way that through a computer 

 program, you could make that computer emulate another computer. The 

 person using it may think he is working on another computer. One advantage 

 to the Navy would be that the Navy has aboard ship many different computers, 

 and if you had a virtual computer working with all the others and one of the 

 others went down, the virtual machine would take over the work of the one that 

 went down while it was being repaired. For example, if a computer that is 

 directing a radar goes down, then the virtual machine takes over and directs the 

 radar. One virtual machine, through programming, senses when another 

 computer goes down and takes over. It can exercise the same coding that the 

 other computer has without destroying the problem. That's an interesting 

 concept that's coming along, and we've got some people working on it right 

 now, but it will take some development to perfect it. 



I assume the speeds of computers will keep going up with all these 

 small shifts, but there's a limit to the speed of light for transmitting an 

 electrical signal. If you reach the speed of light, you couldn't get any 

 faster on a computer; however, we're not there yet. 



How far are we. from it? 



Well, I'm not sure, but I felt around 1960 when we got the 

 STRETCH that there wouldn't be much improvement in the speed of 

 computers. Now we have the 6700, and it is a lot faster, so it's hard to 

 tell where technology will take us in speeds. 



Dahlgren should be proud of the fact that we've had a very outstand- 

 ing computer organization here. I think it hasn't always been appreciated 

 by everybody, but when we hear from people in other laboratories who 

 use our system and our programs, they're generally very complimentary. 

 The capability hasn't come by accident. For instance, the decision to hire 

 mathematicians as programmers in the mid-1940's was the key decision 

 in developing our capability. I think there's a good future for them. 



The programs we have now are good ones. Obviously, once you get 

 large programs using computers, there are generally follow-on programs, 

 and they all require more computing than we had before. Another ad- 

 vantage of having programs like POLARIS, POSEIDON, TRIDENT, and 

 the Transit Satellite System is that they require large computers, and 

 they pay most of the cost. People in the other departments at Dahlgren 

 with small computing problems couldn't afford to have a big computer 



