My read on this is that Whirlwind was radical because it was 16 bit parallel. Previously anything to get a compute machine working would do, and bit serial is pretty natural. This one was designed from the get-go for speed.
I think it's even more than that - it birthed SAGE and many other descendants. The wild thing is how readable and recognizable the ISA is. Someone ought to build an emulator...
Love the Whirlwind! i think of it as the original microcontroller, except not very micro of course. The 2kw address space is a bit small for bigger programs unfortunately, but it's still great fun to play with anyways.
Not implying whirlwind is the ur-machine, or originated terms of art, just noting that a lot of language in 1951 could be understood to apply in a domain-specific sense to a modern computer scientist: the jargon we use now, includes terms of art that these people use.
Later, the transistorized TX-0 and TX-2 computers were based on the MIT Whirlwind I. The DEC PDP-1 was based on the TX-2.
They are therefore at least 75 years old.