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.