Some years before the first transmission was made, in part, in Boelter Hall, another machine made UCLA a center for technological advancement. In the late 1940s UCLA’s College of Engineering received a differential analyzer, also known as a mechanical computer, from General Electric. This analog machine cost $125,000 to make and performed mechanical calculations at an unprecedentedly fast rate. Housed at UCLA, near the center of the film making industry, the mechanical computer even became a movie star when it was displayed in the 1951 science-fiction movie When Worlds Collide.
Unfortunately, UCLA’s mechanical computers eventually became outdated in the 1960s, though it clearly served as a forerunner to what Kleinrock and the others would do later on in that decade. One of the machines was sent to the Smithsonian Institute in 1978, but it will be remembered for mid century technology advancement in Southern California.
Kleinrock