During WWII, the U.S. government censored the weather Even baseball rain delays went unexplained. A World War II poster, created for the War Production Board around 1942-1943, declares "Weather is a weapon." Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The call went out from WREC's studios in downtown Memphis at 6:57 p.m. Central War Time: Doctors and nurses were urgently needed in communities south and west of the city. That was all the information the station was allowed to provide, despite the ongoing threat.

On July 7, 1958, several men gathered around a machine inside the offices of the United States Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C., about fifteen blocks west of the White House. As wide as a kitchen refrigerator, twice as deep, and nearly as tall, the machine was just one piece of a mainframe computer that fanned across the room like a multipiece furniture set. It was encased in silvery plastic, reflecting the light from above, and the front panel held row after row of small round lightbulbs, red square buttons, and thick plastic switches, some white and some gray. Normally, this $2 million machine ran calculations for the Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, but on this day, it was on loan to the U.S. Navy and a twenty-nine-year-old Cornell University professor named Frank Rosenblatt. As a newspaper reporter looked on, Rosenblatt and his Navy cohorts fed two white cards into the machine, one marked with a small square on the left, the other marked on the right.