Today, we have Fitbit, a tiny wearable computer that instantly analyzes your physical activity from inside a band slipped over your wrist. But in 1959, a state-of-the-art physical activity tracker was a little different.
It weighed about 2,000 pounds (4,000 with the power supply). It asked you to input all data by hand (through a punch card reader). And it needed several hours to spit out the results (if you were lucky).
>Based on an IBM 650 mainframe, this proto-sports-geek creation nearly doubled the winning percentage of the Institute's hoops team. Take that, Fitbit.
But apparently, it worked. Witness this glorious 1959 IBM promotional film where Big Blue shows off the Eisenhower-era computerized basketball coach developed by Ohio's Case Institute of Technology (see below). Based on an IBM 650 mainframe, the video tells us this proto-sports-geek creation nearly doubled the winning percentage of the Institute's hoops team. Take that, FitBit.
With almost 2,000 units sold, the IBM 650 was one of the most popular computers of the 1950s. It was engineered for "ordinary businesses," but as a general purpose machine, it could also crunch basketball stats. Yes, you needed a human pair of eyes to record each player's shots, rebounds, and passes. But once you fed this data into the 650 via punch cards, the machine could analyze it at a whopping 50,000 calculations per minute and spit out a profile of each player.
In other words, it didn't provide real-time analytics. But during a game, a human coach could consult the computer's findings to help devise a better game plan. Or so we're told.
"It is a fairly simple matter to keep in mind the top man or the worst performance of the evening," reads a contemporary document from the Case archives that describes the project. "But how about the others? Are they taking advantage of every scoring opportunity? Are there defensive mistakes which lead to an opponent's score? The system has also been able to determine whether men playing one position are capable of taking over at another spot."
Before Case's electronic basketball coach sprung into action, the team won a mere six out of 16 games. But with the help of its computerized trainer, it won 11 out of 14. And after the film was made, the team would go on to win its league championship. Coincidence? Pshaw.
"The computer cannot create victory when talent is lacking," Case's history says. "However, it has been proven with the aid of the electronic brain and the correct equations, a bad team can be made to look better and a good team can be made tops by thoroughly evaluating each player and his performance."
The system used a home-brewed algorithm developed by student mathematician Don Knuth, who would later pen The Art of Computer Programming. It was meant to supercharge the IBM 650, widely considered the first all-purpose computer, and on at least one level, Knuth succeeded.
But, no, the 650 couldn't replace a human coach. "There are some flaws in the system which cannot be controlled. Predictions cannot be made which evaluate attitude, a prime requisite for a good athlete," the history says. "It is situations like this that guarantee that electronic computers will never replace the locker room pep talk."
Fifty years later, that still holds true. Things like the Fitbit are certainly a big step forward, but we still have a certain fondness for machines like the 650. Can a Fitbit handle missile design, heart medicine, highway engineering, and dairy farms? No, it can't.
