What Happened on March 8th

The MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory hosted its first symposium on digital fire control, featuring Whirlwind, a large-scale electronic stored-program vacuum tube computer originally designed as a flight simulator for the US Navy. On the second day of the meeting, March 9, a program called "Director" was demonstrated by project leader Douglas Ross. Director could be considered a rudimentary operating system since it allocated and controlled system resources (like memory, storage, and printing) automatically during execution of a user's program.