FIRSTTIME COMPUTERS WERE USED IN…

MEDICINE

Dr Homer Warner was the first to use computers in the operating room to track real-time blood pressure and heart-rate data – not bad for Utah in the 1950s. Working with hospital engineers to build the data-collecting circuit, he later said of what they built: “I didn’t even know it was a computer.” Two decades later, he created one of the first computerised health-records systems, which not only held patient data digitally in one place, but helped physicians interpret it for treatment. It was dubbed Health Evaluation through Logical Processing, or HELP, so doctors would feel less threatened, noted Michael Millenson, the author of Doctors and Accountability in the Information Age, in Forbes.

CARRACING

Formula 1 is now a computer arms race, but when the championship started in 1950, computers were in their infancy. The first race cars were hand-drawn by engineers “armed with a retractable pencil and a fancy set of French curves”, notes the McLaren website. In 1975, that changed, with McLaren using telemetry in its IndyCar automobiles, nabbing 14 categories of data that had to be downloaded to a computer once back in the garage. F1 caught up the following decade, but the data needed to be downloaded after each lap, meaning the garage housed rack-mounted computers alongside tyres and wrenches.

BALLISTICS

That very first electronic, general-purpose computer that the Lyons managers spotted in the US in the late 1940s was ENIAC – the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. First shown off in 1946, it was designed to calculate ballistics charts, doing in seconds what a human took a full day to accomplish. It wasn’t so simple as plugging in the figures and awaiting the answers on the other end, though. To program ENIAC, engineers had to physically rewire it. “It took one or two days for preparing the machine in order to make one type of calculation, but it would make a great win in terms of calculation time,” explained Dr Giuseppe Primiero, senior lecturer in computing science at Middlesex University London.