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MITRE Arrives: July 1958 July 2008
The year was 1958. It was the halfway point in Eisenhower's second term as president. The Nation's first satellite, Explorer I, roared into the heavens. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was established with a mission of putting a man into space within two years. And the Federal Aviation Agency came into being as the guardian of the national air space. Bob Everett, then 37, sat in front of a typewriter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrestling with words. A decision arrived at the previous January by MIT, Lincoln Laboratory, and the United States Air Force created a new, not-for-profit company that would take over the ongoing systems engineering and weapons integration of the nation's air defense system called SAGE, for Semi-automatic Ground Environment. The new company was to be named MITRE, and it fell to Everett to put it all down on paper. He typed seven pages. The first line that he typed read: "The new corporation should be formed as rapidly as possible and its sponsorship and officers chosen and announced." The date was May 26. The very next month, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory formally turned over control of the SAGE continental air defense system to the Air Force's Air Defense Command. And a month after that, on July 21, the new corporation was formally announced with a full-page spread in the New York Times. Getting to Work Early on, MITRE moved in together with its first customer, the United States Air Force, sharing space with the Air Defense Systems Integration Division, or ADSID, in a small, wooden building out behind Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Ma.
On September 1, MITRE, working as a subcontractor to MIT, took up the challenge of knitting together the massive digital network that was SAGE. Twenty-two three-story blockhouses that made up the SAGE family of direction centers in the United States, along with a twenty-third in Canada, were put on line. Beginning with the first at McGuire AFB in Pemberton, N.J., on June 26, the massive duplexed SAGE computers were each programmed in 15 days by a crew of 75 programmers and engineers. Over a thousand pages of mathematical formulas transferred to three million IBM punch cards were fed into each machine. Jump-Starting Computers as We Know Them Along with programming would also come weapons integration, as MITRE took on the job of adding BOMARK and Nike-Hercules missiles, the Century Series of jet interceptors like the F-104 and F-106, as well as Texas Towers, Navy picket ships, and ALRI airborne radar platforms. By 1961, 22 SAGE direction centers were linked. As General Curtis LeMay, Commander of the Strategic Air Command, said of MITRE's efforts, "it made the fundamental concept of a coordinated air battle and defense in depth a practical reality." Smaller versions of SAGE were then replicated for NATO's defense of Europe, and in Asia for Japan. Computer historian Stan Augarten remarked, "Above all, SAGE taught the American computer industry how to design and build large, interconnected, real-time data-processing systems. "Through SAGE...technology was transferred to the world at large, and computer systems as we know them today came into existence." —by Tom Green Editor’s note: On July 21, 1958, The MITRE Corporation was founded. As we celebrate our 50th anniversary, we look back on that moment in time. This story can also be viewed as a video. Related Information Articles and News
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