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 Raj, 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 letter “Newton, Not 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.

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

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 Coincident-Current Magnetic-Core Mem­ory, and also as a general-purpose 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 ­magnetic-matrix 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 project grew out of the invention and development work led by Jay W. Forrester at the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory under Project Whirlwind. The Whirlwind I computer was retrofitted with a magnetic-core memory about the same time I was there.

Both the MTC and Whirl­wind I computers, like 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.