On a Sunday afternoon in December 1951, viewers of the television program "See It Now" listened raptly as newscaster Edward R. Murrow spoke. "These are days of mechanical and electronic marvels," he said. "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a new one for the navy.

		"This latest wonder, Murrow told his audience, was the Whirlwind electronic computer." With considerable trepidation," he went on," we undertake to interview this new machine. Now to M.I.T. and the computer laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts." The next thing viewers saw on their screens was what seemed to be a neat array of lights flashing a greeting. HELLO MR. MURROW, said the lights. But they were not really lights at all, in the then-conventional sense of the word. They were little points of brilliance positioned to spell out the message on the Whirlwind's CRT. Thus began the public's introduction to the new world of computer graphics.
Edward Murrow interview via phone.

M.I.T. engineer Jay W. Forrester, microphone and earphone cable trailing stiffly from beneath his jacket, put this curious invention through some of its paces. From his New York studio, Murrow spoke by telephone with a Pentagon based Navy admiral who posed a problem of the kind that the machine had been built to solve. It involved computations of the fuel consumption, trajectory and velocity of the Viking rocket, which was designed to reach an altitude of about 135 miles before plummeting back to earth. As viewers and a slightly bemused Murrow looked on, Whirlwind's screen glowed with a graph, composed of the same kind of dots as the greeting, that represented the rocket's path, speed and fuel consumption while on a typical flight.