Video Excerpt

IRV
Once the simplex method was developed, was it immediately used to solve some planning problems by hand?

GEORGE
Yes, two problems, the Berlin Airlift and the Minimum Cost diet problem. You've got to remember there wasn't any computers.

IRV
Right!

GEORGE
It was a great idea, and everybody immediately saw it had great potential. So we went through the game of developing the whole planning process using computers, and in fact, we were responsible for actually getting money from the airforce and military to the manufacturers to build computers to research on them.

IRV
We always try to look for connections between the early developments of computers with the first Univac built at the University of Pennsylvania and the development of linear programming. Can you describe some of those connections?

GEORGE
If my memory serves me right, ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers was built by Eckert and Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and then moved to the Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. It was built before linear programming was invented. UNIVAC also was built by Eckert and Mauchly a few years after linear programming was invented.

IRV
Were some of the early computers built for the purpose of solving linear programs?

GEORGE
Yes. And of course they were also built for other people with different applications in mind. If you ask the question if we visualized that the computer would evolve as it did, we all saw that the computer was meant to be something, and in our minds eye, the computer wasn't much different than it was today. It seems hard to believe!

IRV
That is hard to believe!

GEORGE
Except we did not visualize their present phenomenal speed.

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