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The witness seminar ”Att modellera slagfältet” [Modelling the battlefield] was held at The National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm on 15 October 2007 and was led by Magnus Hagwall. Different aspects of the early use of electronic computers to analyze and study military problems at the National Defence Research Establishment (FOA) were discussed at the seminar, particularly the use of computers to carry out simulations of combat scenarios and weapons effects against different targets. Special attention was paid to the time period from 1954, when the introduction of BESK first made computer simulations possible, to 1966 when the IBM 7090 mainframe computer at FOA was replaced. Operations research provided new problems for computer programming. The design of computer models for submarine hunt, armored combat and ground-to-air combat developed at FOA in the late 1950s and 1960s were discussed at the seminar. Other problems brought up were the development of computer models to study the effects of artillery shells against airplanes and armored tanks. The use of FORTRAN to develop programs for IBM 709 and IBM 7090 was described. The design of the information handling system CORSAIR was touched upon. Moreover, the seminar discussed the use of IBM 7090 mainframe computers to develop programs for meteorological analysis. The critical importance of fast input and output facilities for meteorological applications was underlined. Finally, the reliability of large computer models to study battle-field scenarios was debated. QC 20130422 |
