Office of Naval Research From 1942 to 1945 Crawford served as a civilian attached to the Navy's Special Devices Section (a predecessor of the
Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division) at Sands Point, Long Island. In 1946 this became the Special Devices Center under the newly created
Office of Naval Research (ONR). Crawford supervised the Navy Ballistics Computation Program until September 1948 when he accepted a temporary position with the Research and Development Board of the Department of Defense. As head of the computer section in ONR he came into contact with
Jay Forrester at MIT who, with his collaborator
Robert Everett (computer scientist), headed a project that had roots in developing flight simulators for pilot training and evolved into the
Whirlwind Project which in turn prepared the way for the air-defense application SAGE (
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment). From Forrester's point of view, Crawford was a significant contributor and supporter whom he described as "uninhibited, not restrained by protocol or chain of command, and a freewheeling intervener in many circles of activity":Perry Crawford was an electrical engineering graduate of MIT and a person with continually unfolding visions of futures that others had not yet glimpsed. He was the first person in about 1946 to call my attention to the possibility of digital rather than analog computers. He was always looking, listening, and projecting new ideas into the future. ... In the fall of 1947, following conversations with Perry Crawford, we wrote two documents, numbered L-1 and L-2, that showed how digital computers could manage a Naval task force and interpret radar data. In July 1948, at a conference at the University of California in Los Angeles, Crawford proposed using computers for the control of aircraft. On March 18, 1949, at a panel meeting of the Research and Development Board, he pushed the idea of digital computers in an air defense system.Crawford also contributed to the
Moore School Lectures with a talk entitled "Applications of Digital Computation Involving Continuous Input and Output Variables" (August 5, 1946). It discussed such topics as missile and combat simulations and was originally classified as confidential and not published until . He stressed his conviction that these applications could best be performed with the aid of digital computers, a thesis many did not agree with at the time. He gave a talk at a session on electronic computers at the 1947 conference of the
Institute of Radio Engineers on "Applications of Electronic Digital Computers" which was summarized in the program:A discussion of computer applications, including scientific calculations, wave propagation, and aerodynamics. Comments will be made on the future relation of analogue and digital computers, and also on the possible engineering application of electronic digital computers to automatic process and factory control, air traffic control, and business calculations.
International Business Machines Crawford left his civilian service in the Navy in 1952 to join
IBM. The company had been working with the military on SAGE and anticipated further developments in real-time applications. in 1954
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., son of IBM's founder, oversaw Crawford's placement, along with
Hans Peter Luhn, to head the design team for creating a digital computer system for managing American Airline's reservations and ticketing. Named SABRE (Semi-Automatic Research Environment), it soon grew to managing the total operation: flight planning, crew schedules, special meals, etc. The project was at the time easily the largest civilian computerization task ever undertaken, involving some 200 technical personnel producing a million lines of program code. ... By the early 1970s all the major carriers possessed reliable real-time systems and communications networks that had become an essential component of their operations, second in importance only to the airplanes themselves. Crawford continued in IBM until his retirement in 1988 working towards what he saw as a necessary "computer transition" as outlined in his 1979 publication below, but otherwise rarely publicized outside of IBM. In a 1980 interview R. Blair Smith, the IBM marketing manager whose contact with American Airlines initiated SABRE, described Crawford's Imaging project:It's a shame we didn't bring it out, but there was a great need for Perry Crawford's concept of imaging. ... Perry's idea was to eliminate typical application programming altogether by having a master program; then have all of the data concerned with, say, running a given business available and identified in the computer. Then if somebody wanted a report of any kind, all he had to do was to tell the computer what was wanted, identify the data from which it would be drawn, and out would come the result. Now, that's an over-simplification. Obviously it would be terribly complex to do. It was a most difficult job, and it never got off the ground. ... I told him he'd have a tough time, because with the status of programming the way it is today, after all of these years of programming, and the programming languages we have developed, introducing the Imaging concept would be about as difficult as converting the typical American to the metric system today. == Personal life ==