

IBM Ad for SAGE, A Massive Cold War Air Defense System (1960) - bane
http://laughingsquid.com/ibm-ad-for-sage-a-massive-cold-war-air-defense-system-1960/

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brandall10
They have a nice exhibit on this at the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View, complete with actual old consoles and all. I highly recommend checking
it out, had never heard of it before seeing it last year.

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Tloewald
I particularly like the fire button being one of a gigantic bank of identical
buttons. Of course pressing it by mistake would be "user error".

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ahelwer
The light-gun user interface is interesting.

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andrewcooke
especially since it looked like a vector (rather than raster) display. so how
did it work?

[edit: yup, vector -
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics#Applications>]

i guess when they used the device they must trigger some kind of raster scan.
that would explain why they had to hold it in place.

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Luc
I don't know how the light gun worked, but the vector display used was pretty
unusual. The 'Typotron' (a.k.a. 'Charactron') could display 25,000 characters
per second. It didn't draw them in the usual fashion of a vector display.
Instead it displayed them by deflecting the electron beam at the right
location in a stencil, then deflecting it again to the right spot on the
screen!

[http://history-
computer.com/ModernComputer/Electronic/SAGE.h...](http://history-
computer.com/ModernComputer/Electronic/SAGE.html)

<http://www.wps.com/projects/Charactron/>

EDIT: Ooh, better information in this PDF:
<http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/PDFs/p19-hurst.pdf>

The Typotron was like a Charactron, but could store data, too. Apparantly the
light gun was used only to click on light points, not on dark bits of the
tube, so it was 'trivial' to determine what was clicked on (the second page of
the PDF talks about how the light gun was basically invented and prototyped in
one day somewhere in '48 or '49).

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mikeash
For some reason, when I look at pictures of SAGE, the part that _really_ makes
it look outdated is the ashtray built in to the operator console.

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arethuza
According the the SAGE Wikipedia entry the operator consoles also had built in
_cigarette lighters_ as well as ashtrays. :-)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environme...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environment)

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simonw
"By the time SAGE was completely operational, the Soviet bomber threat had
been replaced by the Soviet missile threat, for which SAGE was entirely
inadequate."

They still kept it running for 20 years though.

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cmkrnl
If that isn't the defining quality of a government project, I don't know what
is.

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loceng
Feel like science-fiction to anyone else?

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joezydeco
It did to Hollywood. Many decommissioned AN/FSQ-7 control panels were used in
various movies and TV shows. Or maybe it was just the same one used over and
over...

<http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Q7/>

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njharman
My dad worked on SAGE for a short while. All I know is the bldg was a big
block of windowless concrete.

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jff
Really an amazing system. Too bad modern computer terminals don't have
consoles like that :)

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dhughes
They look so clean did they get that way through lack of use or were they
restored I wonder?

I can't imagine the night janitorial crew giving a spritz and wiping down
those workstations with all the buttons and switches.

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marshray
I'm sure there was some restoration, but I thought leaving the yellowed note
on the phone with the General's number was a nice touch.

Those machines were pretty darned expensive. They were all taken very good
care of. Except for the paper-handling equipment, almost anything that
involved opening the cabinet would probably have been done by IBM personnel.

The military was also known for keeping just their ordinary stuff clean. It
surely went double for the air defense computers. Top brass from the Pentagon
were likely dropping by for a tour on a regular basis.

In the years following WWII as one of the only large industrial nations that
had not been bombed to smithereens, the amount of capital the US had to spend
on this kind of thing just boggles the imagination.

Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7> : The AN/FSQ-7 computer
contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 0.5 acres (2,000 m2) of of floor
space, weighed 275 tons, and used up to three megawatts of power. The _fifty-
two_ AN/FSQ-7s remain the physically largest computers ever built, and will
likely hold that record in the future.

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njharman
The blinkin lights remind of WOPR. Wonder if this commercial inspired that
movie?

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pnathan
I don't have the citation to-hand, but part of SAGE's development cycle was a
emulator/simulator on which tests were run. It was reported as being a
reasonably effective debugging mechanism.

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learc83
I wonder what the success rate for intercepts really was.

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brianobush
Imagine a legit flight that was punched in wrong. _Boom_ That would be a bad
false-positive.

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lutorm
My thought exactly. Or one of those punchcards dropping on the floor.

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mv
Wow. It really makes you wonder what can be accomplished today!

