Designing these kinds of systems in the 50s and 60s must have been one of the all-time peak engineering experiences. Nearly everything on paper and drafting film, stacks of databooks, nomograms, slide rules, electromechanics everywhere, stratospheric budgets, hand wiring, manually machined parts and just generally making up and discovering things, from machining to physics, as you go along that we now consider fundamentals.
While deep diving into the history of how digital computers evolved from the initial ENIAC era of the late 1940s to the IBM 360 and DEC PDPs of the early 60s, I was surprised by just how much fundamental 1950s tech engineering was driven by the massive effort (and budgets) to create the technology needed to enable the national air defense network NORAD would later manage.
While a lot of the basic research existed on paper, turning that into functional 24/7 systems at mega-scale was an almost unimaginable engineering challenge. The fragments which already existed were little more than one-off prototype computers like ENIAC, none of which were remotely close to big enough, fast enough or reliable enough. So they were faced with creating pretty much the full stack from transistors to storage to networking to displays - all of which had to be several generations bigger, faster and better than anything that had ever been shown to even sort-of work on a lab bench. While the budgets were huge, the requirements were equally insane and there was huge pressure to deliver it ASAP. And "it" had to actually work and then be built, deployed and operated daily across dozens of locations. It ultimately involved dozens of huge companies, hundreds of sub-contractor firms and tens of thousands of people. Pretty much everything I'd ever heard about in 1960s computing, when I dug into where the fundamental tech came from, ended up tracing back to enabling something the air defense network needed in the 50s.
I came away realizing the mid-60s scalable commercial computing industry I think of as my ancestral 'up-line' in computing, the 360/PDP systems which led to the 1970s 8-bit microprocessors which led to the 80s home computers anyone could own, would have all been at least a decade later without the crazy mad dash in the 1950s to enable the air defense build-out.
To put a name on it, i believe you are talking about SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
https://sage.mitre.org/ (see also links at the end)
SAGE also pioneered user interface technology, for example:
The first pointing device: https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=727
The first naked lady on a computer: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-n...
And bits of the machinery went on to a long and varied career in film and TV: https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.php?c=73
It is more than the computer tech. Norad's tasking to the computer people was itself pulled from the air combat tech of the time: fast planes with very short-ranged weapons. With the threat of incoming supersonic bombers, NORAD needed to get interceptors on the tail of those bombers within, perhaps, a one-mile margin if they were to employ the missiles/gun available at the time. At supersonic speeds, and fuel reserved measured in seconds, delay or calculation error was unacceptable.
Any system of human controllers talking to human pilots would not be up to the task. Even a one-second delay would have meant a missed intercept. They needed machines to make the calculations and issue the orders. Those same machines eventually even controlled the interceptors directly, interacting with onboard radar/autopilot systems to remotely steer fighters into position.
Things would be/are very different today. Long-range air-to-air missiles/radar mean fighters do not need sub-second navigation accuracy to intercept fast targets. Air-to-air refueling also means fighters can loiter in position rather than panic-launch from the ground. Pilots today would balk at the idea of having a computerized ground controller drive "their" aircraft. It is now an unnecessary and alien concept.
Had missile and airborne radar tech advanced a little faster, maybe a little less than a decade, NORAD may not have asked for all those computers. Who knows what the world would look then like today. Get the sparrow (Aim-7) missile ready in 52 instead of 58 and maybe the computer revolution happens much more slowly.
I used to work for a guy who did.
He got his start because he had a security clearance and knew how to install and repair ccd camera systems do he did so for rocky flats and Cheyenne mountain. Then they asked him to build a box that had a film video camera that would take images of a crt display for record keeping. This was before it was possible digitally. So he did, he made 2. Then they needed a lift to bring down the Hughes projectors they used in Cheyenne mountain, the old kind with 3 color crt projectors. It needed to drop down the projector so they could change it out in less time than it took a nuke to come from Russia, so he did. He founded a company to keep making them, they still make them to this day.
> He founded a company to keep making them
So many companies were set up on the back of this cutting edge stuff, as well as Mercury and Apollo, satellites, nuclear reactors, submarines, jet liners, the SR-71, the Heavy Presses, it just goes on and on. Everything from one guy in a barn up to huge corporate labs. Obviously the war already boosted a lot of stuff, but the Atomic Age atmosphere must have felt like an unstoppable industrial whirlwind.
Even though the recent AI hype has been pretty feverish, it doesn't seem like we have had the same kind of top-to-bottom hopeful dynamism.
It's the economy stupid!
The US before WW2 was a regional power. After WW2 it was the only country still standing. This led to decades of unprecedented GDP growth.
I try to warn people about what it means when Asian countries have 30 years of GDP growth of 7% year on year but it barely registers.
In the 50s the industrial might was used to build and improve the country (mostly). Where was the inflection point? Reagan? When we sensed that the USSR was weakening, did the floor elite throw the big lever from "build" to "extract?"
>In the 50s the industrial might was used to build and improve the country (mostly). Where was the inflection point? Reagan?
Reagan was the reaction IMO. We really screwed ourselves in the 70s. Reagananomics, the 1980s (and beyond) financialization of everything, selling the bottom layers of the economic pyramid overseas piecemeal so that stonks could go up and consumers could buy cheaper junk, I see those that more of a reaction. The money and effort poured into those endeavors because it could no longer make a return on industrial endeavors.
What happened in the 70s to invoke such a reaction? I’m aware of vague issues that plagued the Carter admin, but not a good overall picture.
By the 1970s Japan and Western Europe came back online.
A whole bunch of things that reduced reinvestment in the country hit all at once during mostly the first half of that decade.
Vietnam cultural problems came home to roost as did divisive civil rights era race baiting, 1st generation welfare systems (which I know it sounds hard to believe, but were way worse than today in terms of cliffs and disincentivizing productiviety) proliferated, oil crisis, stagflation, a whole bunch of the industrial economy which had been built out around/during WW2 was nearing "reinvest or shut it down" age right at the same time that stuff got regulated to high heaven and the oil crisis hit. As much as people complain about Gen Z being lazy/unmotivated, the hippie boomers were even worse as a workforce (and even more dominant due to the birth rate lull and spike of the depression and ww2).
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/a-history-of-the-ami...
Even in the 70s/80s, some prototypes were hardwired.