PDF Ebook From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer (History of Computing)
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From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer (History of Computing)
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Review
SAGE bears comparison wiht Manhattan Project, the Atlas and Polaris missile programs, and the Apollo moon program. As one of the grattechnological and managerial achievements of the Cold War, it has long deserved the history that Redmond and Smith have now produced.―Alex Roland, Duke University
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About the Author
Kent C. Redmond is Professor of History, Emeritus, at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Thomas M. Smith is Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, at the University of Oklahoma.
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Product details
Series: History of Computing
Hardcover: 547 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (October 16, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1843095750
ISBN-13: 978-0262182010
ASIN: 0262182017
Product Dimensions:
6.2 x 1.8 x 9.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
2 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#188,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
"From Whirlwind to MITRE" is the historical accounts of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project, which was one of the first(perhaps first) large military computer and software development projects for building an aircraft defense system. The book is full of little details and it makes the book at times hard to read as it isn't easy to keep track of who is who, who was where, and who did what. But for computer historians, this book is full of wonderful detail... while at the same time, it actually lacked details. More about that later.The Whirlwind computer was an early computer created at the Servomechanisms lab at MIT by Jay Forrester and his team (Jay Forrester who later became known for its influence in systems thinking). This project was "discovered" by the military who considered it a potentially useful starting point for building an aircraft defense system and asked the Jay Forrester and his team to build a prototype. The building of the prototype took a long time and involved an amazing amount of military and government politics.Eventually, the project got far enough to separate out the team into a separate building/laboratory which they called Lincoln Laboratory. They continued the work on the non-prototype of SAGE (which now had a name). This also meant the involvement of many different contractors, leading to loads of politics, and communication overhead. Parts of the book here are wonderful as, being involved in large projects myself, it is amazing how little has changed since the 50s ;). At some point there was even a competing system which were pitched against each other, but the Whirlwind-based SAGE won that.The project was delivered after more than a decade of work. MIT didn't want to continue with the Lincoln laboratory and thus a new entity was formed to support further development of the SAGE system. This became the MITRE cooperation and many people left Lincoln to join that new company.The coordination and politics is described in an amazing amount of detail, often with extracts from letters or meeting minutes. The actual evolution of some of the hardware was described pretty well. The software development itself wasn't covered in a lot of detail and it felt the authors were lacking understanding there. I felt that that was too bad, not because I have particular interest in that, but also because that became the key delaying activity during the project. I wish there was more details on what made this such a problem, but they weren't there. Adding these would have made it a better book (and a couple hundred pages thicket, I guess).All in all, this was not an easy read and it took me a while. As someone interested in computer history, it was a good read though as rarely do we get so much well-researched details on projects as in this book. So for computer historians, this would definitively be a 5 out of 5 stars, but for people not interested in all the details but would like more conclusions, this is not the right book for you. So probably 2 out of 5. I'll average it upwards to 4/5 stars as I can't begin to imagine the amount of research that must have gone into this book!
I kind of expected this book to be the typical Smithsonian-style broad-stroke history of Whirlwind and the surrounding SAGE project. What I found was an exquisitely detailed account of the system's operation and development, written engagingly and with just the right amount of depth to prove that Redmond and Smith know what they're talking about.Whirlwind and SAGE were mammoth military-industrial undertakings -- far riskier and more ambitious than anything the U.S. government has tackled in recent times. The pace of the entire project, from the initial design sketches to full-blown deployment in concrete bunkers throughout the U.S., seems fantastic compared to modern contractor boondoggles. The project closely followed its projected timeline, practically scheduling technological breakthroughs enroute to a finished, working system that provided air defense security for decades. A classic example of the reach of Whirwind's designers was their decision to use magnetic core memory instead of williams tubes, mercury delay lines, or capacitive memory technologies. Immediately after deciding to use core memory, they set about inventing it so that it would be available for the first prototype machine, which was undergoing design in parallel with the memory development effort. As a result, Whirlwind's memory had unprecedented speed and reliability, and as a side effect core memory would dominate all commercial and government computer systems for the next twenty years.Redmond and Smith provide wonderful insight into the obstacles SAGE developers encountered, with stories that any engineer will find fascinating. For instance, at an early stage of development the streams of radar data being sent to Whirwind for analysis are found to be full of noise and clutter, such as reflections from the ground and migratory flocks of birds. So Whirlwind software developers develop algorithms to filter out this signal trash, only to discover that the Whirlwind processor is far two slow to do both the filtering and its assigned job of sorting, tracking, and designating enemy targets. So SAGE designers push the clutter problem out to the radar signal delivery teams to deal with using analog filtering electronics, almost failing to notice that the science of digital signal processing had just been invented. Together, Whirwind and SAGE advanced computer science by fifty years in just a handful of months. What drove this intense development? The arms race. Fear is a very good motivator, and in such competitive times, science and society seem to reap mass benefits that often go unnoticed.As an aside, when my copy of the book arrived (I bought a used edition from an Amazon vendor), the bookseller had included a note apologizing for the scribbling on the inside front cover (the book was advertised in "new" condition). That "scribbling" turned out to be a personal note from author Kent Redmond to co-author Thomas Smith: "Tom, we did it!".Eat your hearts out!
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