While we often take the enormous amount of computing power at our fingertips for granted, it was the predecessors to our ubiquitous machines that first changed the world, quickly making things once thought impossible commonplace. One of the places where those enormous changes were done was at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, home today to the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division.
Selected images via NASA. Visit nas.nasa.gov
In August of 1918, as the armies of Europe neared exhaustion, American troops of the 28th “Keystone” division were thrown into a nearly forgotten battle that fully represented the horrors of the War to End All Wars.
Of the vaunted ironclad warships of the US Civil War perhaps the mightiest and most terrifying was the confederate ram Tennessee. On August 5, 1864, she would be put to the test in the largest naval engagement of the war, an engagement that defined the divided loyalties of the War of the Rebellion.