Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Research Articles

V2 to Bomarc: Reading Gravity’s Rainbow in Context

In this article I argue that while Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow , is set primarily between 1944-1946 in Europe, it also simultaneously addresses itself to its own authorial context—that of the “Long Sixties” in America. In particular I consider details of Pynchon’s employment at the Bomarc Service News in the years 1960-1962—the Bomarc being a surface-to-air interceptor missile manufactured by the Boeing Aircraft Company for the United States Air Force. Given that the V-2 rocket is the preeminent symbol of control in Gravity’s Rainbow , I argue that we ought to consider Gravity’s Rainbow in relation to the Bomarc, a technological descendent of the V-2, and a key defensive weapon in the Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a centralised system for continental air defence, and the preeminent computerised command and control system of its time. The Bomarc was for these reasons a crucial component of a technical system of control that provided the primary material support for what Paul Edwards has described as the “closed-world discourse” of Cold War America. In light of this history I proceed to read the novel in terms of the operative presence of this discourse in the American public domain—in articles, newsreels and other media—demonstrating the manner in which the ‘Rocket-State’ of Gravity’s Rainbow reconstitutes the human subject as a cyborg, thereby problematising the liberal humanist conception of the subject as discrete, autonomous and autopoetic. I supplement this contextual reading of the novel with formalist considerations for the manner in which the reader of the novel is implicated in Gravity’s Rainbow’s own operations of closure and control, and argue that the reader of the novel is also, regardless of context, subjected to and by the act of reading the novel considered in cybernetic terms. I conclude the essay by reading the novel’s closing moments against the grain of my own argument, and attempt to articulate a place of exception to the regime of control performed by the novel in relation its context and its reader.

Screens in the sky: SAGE, surveillance, and the automation of perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor

This essay investigates the centrality of the U.S. Military in the process of automating the labor of surveillance. The creation of Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an anti-nuclear defense system developed in the 1950s, marked the computerization of the perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor that is necessary for surveillance and is emblematic of screening technologies. The essay situates SAGE in a long history of military surveillance that depended upon media technologies. Building upon the work of Michel Foucault and Freidrich Kittler, it is argued that media are essential for understanding how surveillance is problematized for security.

Real Time/Zero Time

Like hard-core pornography, about which U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart notoriously said, know it when I see it, the phrase may be much easier to spot than to define.1 What digital media scholars see as evidence of real time-the copresence, for instance, of an event and its live stream on the Web-is different from what computer scientists refer to when they talk about real-time computing, which is a system's mission-critical aspect: for example, an air bag inflates before a driver is thrown through the windshield. Or consider the phrase itself: real time is not real-time or realtime; the noun refers to a certain temporality, while the adjective form can refer to speed, rate of change, or interactivity; real time can be a synonym for virtuality, or even its putative opposite, realness.The trouble with real time is not the proliferation of definitions, which should be welcomed; the trouble is that we too often confuse real time with the medium that manifests it. Whereas digital media scholars see real time as synonymous with the temporality of computer networks, television scholars might see real time in terms of the liveness of television broadcasts, while film scholars may find it in the moving image's seeming continuity, a motion simulated twenty-four frames a second. This leads to confusion between cause and effect. Consider, for example, art historian Michael Newman, who invokes the term when writing of the ethical stakes of analog cinema in the face of digitization. For Newman, digital technology leaves in its wake interchangeable media in the simultaneity of time.2 The words he uses to discuss the regime of the digital are striking, because 'real' aptly describes the very thing he opposes to digital media: analog cinema.Quoting a character of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who exclaims that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, Mary Ann Doane has suggested that electricity produced instantaneity roughly a hundred years before digital technologies such as the Internet.3 In her investigation of films such as the Execution of Czolgosz (1901), in which bodies were burned with electricity and other stimuli, she notes that electricity generates a virtually instantaneous bodily response-the nerve of the world. By annihilating delay, electricity tied together the globe, producing its own global simultaneity.4 Electricity also pointed to the delay or dead that occurs between action and response in everyday life. Doane uses this idea to argue that structuring time through narrative and editing, cinema achieves a maximum reduction of wasted time, a time' that is much more than 'real time' itself.5 In other words, a hundred years before Newman's critique of simultaneity, cinema too was billed as global, simultaneous, a medium that annihilated all earlier forms of media.What my example suggests is that real time may at the present moment be synonymous with digital technology, but the term is much more malleable; it has a way of adhering to the latest technology. Within the history of computer technology, the effort to locate the earliest moment of real time often results in ever more diffuse examples. We know that real-time technologies came largely out of the of war; we know, for instance, that the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, deployed in 1958 to track incoming Soviet bombers, was the first computer system that offered the ability to interact with the screen in real time and led to the first real-time business applications.6 The phrase is first used inj. P. Eckert's 1946 description of a digital time' computing machine that might replace analog (or true) computing machines in gun positioning, missile guidance, flight simulation, and industrial control.7 Eckert limits himself to four applications, because analog devices would have been considered more suitable for real-time applications than their cumbersome digital terparts. …

IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame Jay Wright Forrester

IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame Jay Wright Forrester

From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer (review)

In 1980, Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith published their classic Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer, which remains the most important account of the first digital electronic computer, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The idea for the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system, the topic of their new book, grew out of Project Whirlwind, when the United States Department of Defense realized that the Whirlwind computer might be the core of a continental early warning system. From Whirlwind to MITRE appears in the History of Computing series edited by I. Bernard Cohen and William Aspray. It presents an organizational and social history of one of the foundational projects of the computer era from [End Page 203] its initial test in 1951 at Bedford, Massachusetts, to the first installation of a SAGE center and the transfer of development activities to the newly formed MITRE Corporation in 1958.

From whirlwind to MITRE: the R&D story of the SAGE air defense computer

This book presents an organizational and social history of one of the foundational projects of the computer era: the development of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system, from its first test at Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1951, to the installation of the first unit of the New York Air Defense Sector of the SAGE system, in 1958. The idea for SAGE grew out of Project Whirlwind, a wartime computer development effort, when the U.S. Department of Defense realized that the Whirlwind computer might anchor a continent-wide advance warning system. Developed by MIT engineers and scientists for the U.S. Air Force, SAGE monitored North American skies for possible attack by manned aircraft and missiles for twenty-five years.Aside from its strategic importance, SAGE set the foundation for mass data-processing systems and foreshadowed many computer developments of the 1960s. The heart of the system, the AN/FSQ-7, was the first computer to have an internal memory composed of magnetic cores, thousands of tiny ferrite rings that served as reversible electromagnets. SAGE also introduced computer-driven displays, online terminals, time sharing, high-reliability computation, digital signal processing, digital transmission over telephone lines, digital track-while-scan, digital simulation, computer networking, and duplex computing.The book shows how the wartime alliance of engineers, scientists, and the military exemplified by MIT's Radiation Lab helped to transform research and development practice in the United States through the end of the Cold War period.

The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America by Paul N. Edwards

1008 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Dr. Randolph, a historian whose research and teaching have focused on science and technology in the USSR, is president of the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, in Washington, D.C. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. By Paul N. Edwards. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Pp· xx+428; illustrations, tables, notes. $40.00 (cloth). This challenging work offers a bold interpretation of the philo­ sophical underpinnings of digital computing. Eschewing the re­ ceived “canonical” treatments of economic historians and com­ puter scientists, Paul Edwards substitutes an interpretation grounded in the theories of discourse elaborated by his mentor, in­ tellectual historian Donna Haraway. Edwards believes digital computing emerged from the doctrine of command, communications, and control as articulated by military planners during World War II and the early years of the cold war. Faced with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, these planners imagined an intricate feedback system that would process informa­ tion about foreign attacks and respond automatically. Theirs was a neat, “closed” world. Digital computing, with its rigid logic gov­ erned by feedback routines, complemented the goals of the military planners. Through massive programs such as the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) antiaircraft defense system, comput­ ers provided the military with a practical tool that could seemingly transform its thinking from ideal to reality. SAGE and several succes­ sor programs, funded under budgets swollen by cold war anxieties, pumped resources into computing during the early fifties, ultimately inculcating the nascent discipline with the values of command and control. Digital computing thus took on the attributes of a closed world of its own rather than serving as the liberating technology it might have been. Later, the disciplines of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology helped perpetuate the symbiosis between com­ puting, command, and control. Each constituted a “closed world” in which small groups of practitioners, funded in large part by the military, tried to reduce the complexities of human thinking and emotions to mechanistic feedback routines that could be emulated by computer. As Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers demonstrated so memorably more than three decades ago in the film Dr. Strangelove, closed worlds such as those depicted by Edwards can readily be made to seem absurd. Viewed from outside, their simplifying assumptions about humanity appear callous if not horrid, and their faith in the ability to achieve technical perfection seems wildly naive. In high­ lighting these particular discourses, then, Edwards inevitably infuses his work with the dark gloom of wasteful tragedy. (The dustjacket, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1009 fittingly, shows technicians seated at terminals in the hazy blue light ofan anti-missle control center.) In his hands the history ofcomput­ ing becomes a story of lost opportunity, of possibilities foreclosed or at least long delayed by devotion to misguided ideals. Is this correct? Does the discourse Edwards so cleverly assembles and deciphers accurately capture the history of digital computing? There is ample cause for doubt. For in constructing his narrative, Edwards has fallen into the same trap as his subjects: he portrays as all-encompassing what is in fact a highly selective, closed world. Significandy, Edwards is most effective when writing about the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, where he can concentrate on small groups or even specific individuals who left a record of ideas in published works and transcripts. One must ask, however, how important these narrowly circumscribed intellec­ tual communities have been in the development of digital comput­ ing. Of course, Edwards offers these studies in an effort to further illustrate the influence of a type of thinking he associates with the military. This is an institution of substantial reach, and certainly no one familiar with the history ofcomputing would deny that it played a significant role. (Indeed, some readers of this volume might criti­ cize Edwards for merely repackaging what historians such as Ken­ neth Flamm and Arthur Norberg have already written.) But a grow­ ing body of literature by scholars such as James Cortada, JoAnne Yates, and Emerson Pugh demonstrates convincingly that the roots of computing run deep into the private sector as well. To be sure, important antecedents...

The Whirlwind computer project

The authors describe how they led the development of the Whirlwind I (WWI) digital computer and its evolution into the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air-defense system for North America. The project from 1945 through 1956, beginning at a time when no general-purpose, high-speed, electronic computer existed, was from the start dedicated to performance and reliability suitable for real-time control. After several shifts in objectives, Whirlwind became an experimental system for demonstrating that a digital computer could analyze the flow of radar data and generate control orders for fighter-plane interceptions of bombers. The resulting successor computers, the AN/FSQ-7, were installed in a network across the United States and Canada in the late 1950s. The SAGE System control centers were in operation about 25 years and demonstrated a 99.8% up-time reliability. In the Whirlwind Project, vacuum tube life was raised from 500 hours to 500000 hours, marginal checking allowed the automatic detection of aging and drifting of electronic components before they reached the point of failure, random-access magnetic-core storage was invented and developed to become the industry standard computer memory for more than two decades, synchronous parallel logic was used, computer-driven cathode-ray tube displays were used for the first time, light guns were used to permit an operator to identify displayed images to the computer for action, and multiple displays were time-shared between different operators. >

How the SAGE Development Began

Events leading to the adoption of voice telephone lines for air-defense operational messages are described. This process paved the way for the use of operational data lines in the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system. The paper describes the early considerations leading to the use of a digital computer in SAGE, and how Whirlwind was chosen to be that computer. The context of the development of magnetic core memory is illuminated. The attitudes of engineering professionals toward digital equipment are reviewed. The author reveals how the name "Ground Environment" was created.

History of the Design of the SAGE Computer-The AN/FSQ-7

This paper tells the story of the development of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air-defense computer, the AN/FSQ-7. At the time of its operational deployment in 1958, the AN/FSQ-7 was the first large-scale, real-time digital control computer supporting a major military mission. The AN/FSQ-7 design, including its architecture, components, and computer programs, drew on research and development programs throughout the United States, but mostly on work done at MIT's Project Whirlwind and at IBM.

SAGE-A Data Processing System for Air Defense

The paper is adapted from a presentation at the 1957 Eastern Joint Computer Conference. The authors give details of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system and how it developed.

Production of Large Computer Programs

The paper is adapted from a presentation at a symposium on advanced programming methods for digital computers sponsored by the Navy Mathematical Computing Advisory Panel and the Office of Naval Research in June 1956. The author describes the techniques used to produce the programs for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system.

THE SAGE SYSTEM TRAINING PROGRAM FOR THE AIR DEFENSE COMMAND.

This article describes the development and implementation of a program to train a large-scale, semi-automatic data processing system known as SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment). Particular attention is given to describing the the air defense system, the methodology used to satisfy the training requirements, the conduct of the training program in operational settings, and results of various studies of training effectiveness. Of significance was the emergence of a unique conceptual formulation of system training principles and of associated simulation techniques.

COMPUTER-BASED METHODOLOGY FOR SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT: SITE PRODUCTION AND REDUCTION SYSTEM.

A biological model, the nervous system, is applied to a man–machine system in order to stimulate interdisciplinary thought. Conceptual similarities between engineering, communication, and psychology are examined as they relate to the application of this model. If system designers incorporate afferent (Exercise) and efferent (Evaluation) subsystems so that feedback capability exists, system “learning” becomes feasible. This biological model is operational in the Site Production and Reduction System (SPARS), a computer system providing support for system training in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) System. SPARS problem production (Exercise) and data reduction (Evaluation) capabilities are described and implications for future system technology are presented.

Quality assurance program

The manufacture of components for a system as complex as the computer manufactured by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) Kingston for use use in the SAGE (Semiautomatic Ground Environment) System requires strict adherence to specified requirements. To meet these requirements, analysis and control of vast numbers of fabricating operations are essential. These operations, although minor in themselves, can jeopardize the effective and specified function of the entire computer by their cumulative shortcomings.

Communication channels for SAGE data systems

The sage (semiautomatic ground environment) system is a system of air surveillance and control designed to aid in the air defense of the continental United States. In this system of air surveillance, flight information is transmitted from radars and other sources to a central point where it is processed and evaluated to form a comprehensive picture of the air situation. This picture covers the search area of several radars, thus providing centralized surveillance of a sizable geographic area. The provision of this surveillance capability requires the evaluation of a large amount of information. In addition, to be of any practical use, the surveillance picture must not lag the actual air situation by any very appreciable interval of time. To accomplish this, the flight information must be gathered and evaluated very rapidly. This has been accomplished by minimizing the use of human beings in the surveillance system and leaning heavily on automatic methods. The various automatic data units in the SAGE System are, however, geographically scattered and must be interconnected so that they can process and exchange the flight information. This interconnection is made by special communication systems called data transmission systems which will be described herein.

Sage data terminals

In the sage (semiautomatic ground environment) System,1,2 the function of converting the data in the form generated or used by the processing equipment to a form suitable for transmission over the communication channel is performed by the terminal apparatus of the Western Electric Al digital data signaling system. The major components of the terminals, as shown in the simplified diagram of Fig. 1, are the digital data transmitter (DDT) and the digital data receiver (DDR). At the originating terminal, the data source furnishes three separate components of information to the transmitter: timing, data, and start. The timing component is a continuous sine wave of either 1,300 or 1,600 cps (cycles per second), depending upon the bit rate, which provides means for synchronizing the system. Message information, contained in the data component, is in the form of dipulses. (A dipulse is one complete cycle of the timing wave per bit, which, in telegraph terminology, represents a mark. Absence of a dipulse in the data component represents a space.) The start component consists of single dipulses which group the data into words.

Sage data system considerations

A system for the transmission of binary digital data over telephone circuits has been developed for the SAGE (semiautomatic ground environment) System of air defense. This data transmission system had to meet stringent and varied requirements for data rate, error rate, general applicability, cost, and not least importantly, reliability in the face of enemy action. The nature of these and other requirements are discussed together with some of the history of the development program which led to the present solution. A detailed description of the data-transmission system now being installed throughout the nation is given. The conclusion contains a discussion of problems still remaining and some opinions of future trends in data-transmission systems for air defense and other applications.

The elimination of motor-generator sets as transient buffers for SAGE computers

Motor-generator sets are frequently used as buffers to isolate electronic equipment from severe power transients which may cause misoperation. An investigation of voltage tolerances for digital computers, performance of d-c supplies, and probabilities of fault occurrences indicates that if the power is generated on the site of the electronic equipment, motor-generator sets are not necessary to meet the critical requirements of the digital computers employed in the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air-defense system.

Logical Design of the Digital Computer for the SAGE System

Special design features and performance criteria are described for the logical system in the digital computer used in the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system. Design details are given for the arithmetic element, high-speed multiply, index registers, input-output control, and magnetic drum buffer. The system is designed according to special military application requirements of speed, capacity, reliabiity and flexibility.