IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 3

"India'sproblemsstem
fromthreecauses:
overpopulation,
rampantcorruption,
andnepotism"
-VittalP.Pyati

NASA does not discount the
lift generated by the Newtonian
equal-and-opposite downward
force due to angle of attack;
rather, it acknowledges this as a
component of the total lift. The
NASA Web site includes material for schoolteachers, along
with documentation for its various airfoil software packages.
Kirt	Blattenberger
IEEE	Member
Mt.	Airy,	N.C.	

down To The core

Bureaucracy Blues

I couldn't disagree more with
Nirode Mohanty's assertion
that India's colonial past is
to blame for its present predicament [Forum, August].
India gained freedom in 1947.
Sixty years strikes me as a
sufficient period in which
to shed a colonial past and
strike out on an independent
path. Blaming the British for
India's difficulties is simply
grossly unjust. India's problems stem from three causes:
overpopulation, rampant corruption, and nepotism. The
most basic of these is that
India is one-third the size
of the United States and has
three times its population.
In fact, there were some
unintended and significant
benefits when the British took
over. India's status as the largest democracy in the world is
in no small measure due to
the infrastructure established
by the British for their own
benefit. The British also left
a railroad covering the entire
country, a legal framework
and secular courts, an education system second to none,
a parliamentary government,

	

and more. Before the R aj,
India was a loose federation
of kingdoms in perpetual war
with one another based on
differences in religion, language, and so on. The Moguls
were the predominant power,
and India would probably be
an Islamic country today had
not the British stepped in,
uninvited as they were.
Vittal	P.	Pyati
Beavercreek,	Ohio

FoIled agaIn

The le t t er " new t on , N o t
Bernoulli" [Forum, August]
rails against misinformation
but seems to be guilty of that
very transgression. Using the
examples of an inverted airfoil and a fully symmetrical
airfoil, the writer argues that
the Bernoulli principle cannot
explain how an inverted airfoil could generate lift. But in
fact, the Bernoulli principle
does so handily, according to
NASA. A search of the NASA
Web site on the topic of lift
generation returns results
that leave no doubt that NASA
still endorses the Bernoulli
effect as the primary source
of lift by an airfoil.

IEEE	Spectrum	|	October	2007	|	NA		

The Big Picture in the July
issue shows the delay-line
memory in UNIVAC. But the
accompanying title, "Core
Memories," might confuse
some readers. The term "core
memory" came about from
the development of a different
machine, also in the late 1940s
and early 1950s. The Memory
Test Computer (MTC) was
built at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's
Lincoln Laboratory for the
express purpose of testing
the Multiplanar CoincidentC u r r e n t M a g n e t i c- C o r e
Memory, and also as a generalpurpose computer under a
U.S. Air Force contract. It was
there that I worked with the
MTC between 1952 and 1956.
And it was there, in 1954, that
I completed my master's thesis,
based on a compact magneticmatrix switch to drive the
core memory, instead of an
assortment of big and hot
5998 vacuum tubes.
In the core memory, each
cell was a toroidal ceramic
magnet about 2 to 3 millimeters in diameter whose
polarity represented a 0 or a 1,
and could be switched by current in wires going through
the cores. The computer word
length was 16 bits, for a total
of 64 x 64 x 16 = 65 536 bits of
random access memory using
64 x 64 x 17 = 69 632 cores. The
17th bit checked for even or
odd parity. I don't think any

of us foresaw at the time the
gigabyte memories of today.
The MTC projec t g rew
out of the i nvention a nd
development work led by
Jay W. Forrester at the MIT
Servomechanisms Laboratory
under Project Whirlwind. The
Whirlwind I computer was
retrofitted with a magneticcore memory about the same
time I was there.
Both the MTC and
W h i rlw i n d I c o m p u t e r s ,
l i ke UNIVAC I, were built
with vacuum tubes. Until
computers were constructed
using transistors, their reliability was a constant problem.
Each of these early computers
occupied a large room full of
electronics, with another large
room full of air-conditioning
equipment. Because of their
size and appearance, we called
the earliest magnetic-core
memories "shower stalls."
One of those shower stalls was
exhibited at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington,
D.C., for many years and at the
MIT Museum more recently.
By then, some of the vacuum
tubes had been either broken
or stolen as souvenirs.
Arthur	D.	Hughes
IEEE	Life	Member
Gladwyne,	Pa.	

correcTIon

In "China Reaches for the Red
Planet" [News, August], the
orbit of Phobos should have
been stated as 5989 kilometers
above the surface of Mars, not
5989 meters.
-Ed.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2007
