The SAGE Defense System

297 Pages·2009·14.65 MB·English

TH8 SAGE
AIR DEFENSE SYSTEM
THE SAGE AIR DEFENSE SYSTEM
A PERSONAL HISTORY
THE SAGE AIR DEFENSE SYSTEM
A PERSONAL HISTORY
JOHN F. JACOBS
The MITRE Corporation
Bedford, Massachusetts
c1986 by John F. Jacobs
All rights reserved.
Printed in United States of America. Reproduction of this book, in part or in whole, is
strictly prohibited. For copy information, contact The MITRE Corporation, Corporate
Archives, Burlington Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jacobs, John F.
The SAGE Air Defense System.
1. SAGE (Air defense system) — History. 2. Jacobs,
John F. I. Title.
UG633.J24 1986 358.4'145'0285 86-16286
Book design by Caron Shing
Typographer: Barbara Vachon
To Mary
CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Preface xiii
A SAGE Chronology xv
Introduction 1
1 How I Came to the Digital Computer Laboratory 5
2 The Development of Whirlwind 8
3 The Digital Computer Laboratory Joins Lincoln Laboratory 16
4 Contributions of Air Force Cambridge Research Center 18
5 The Cape Cod System 22
6 Whirlwind II 28
7 Assignment to Group 62 31
8 Defining the Whirlwind II Arithmetic Element 36
9 Jay Forrester and Company 39
10 Selection of a Computer Contractor 43
11 IBM Background 45
12 Lincoln Meets IBM 49
13 The Hartford Meetings 55
14 Project Grind 60
15 Genesis of the Systems Office 63
16 From Boston to Poughkeepsie 70
17 Features of the FSQ-7 74
18 Electronic Warfare 77
19 Defining the SAGE System 82
20 George Valley 86
21 Ma Bell 90
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22 Group 61 94
23 The RAND Corporation and SDC 96
24 Genesis of Computer Programming in SAGE 99
25 Meeting the Need for Programmers 105
26 Scheduling and Other Problems 108
27 A Promotion and the Steering Committee 114
28 SAGE Becomes Operational 117
29 SAGE Systems Testing 122
30 Division 4 126
31 The Task of Integration 130
32 Air Force Reaction and the Beginning of MITRE 135
33 Halligan 144
34 Leaving Lincoln and Joining MITRE 149
35 From SAGE to BUIC 155
36 The Winter Study 160
37 The Mystique of System Engineering 164
38 Summing Up 168
Epilogue 171
The Romance of Programming 175
viii
FOREWORD
S
AGE was a remarkable development that had profound effects
on the development of computers, information systems, and military
capability. Many capable people were involved in its creation, in the Air
Force, at MIT, and in industry, and a number of articles have been written
about the project and a few of its leaders. This memoir is the first inside
story of the project and how it looked and felt to those who were involved.
Jack Jacobs is one of the great participants in the SAGE program; his
contributions, largely unrecognized outside those who worked with him,
were fundamental to success. I have known Jack for 35 years now. He is a
modest man but a first-rate engineer and manager, and a major contributor
to the art of large information systems. His memoir tells us much about
SAGE, about how it was to work within a large pioneering development,
and about Jack himself.
I was at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the early 1950s as an
associate division head, working on the design of the SAGE computer. I
had transferred to Lincoln with the Digital Computer Laboratory. The
division was growing rapidly; we had moved to another larger building,
and I found that the closely knit old group, where everyone knew everyone
else, was becoming a memory.
One day, a tall, good-looking young fellow approached me with
a question. He introduced himself as John F. Jacobs, our newly acquired
graduate student assigned to the logical design of the adder in the comput-
er's arithmetic element. He knew I had done the logical design of the
Whirlwind computer and wanted to know why Whirlwind's adder design
wasn't satisfactory. As I recall the occasion, I gave him a brief and
somewhat lofty lecture on adders, told him the Whirlwind adder was really
quite satisfactory, but suggested he make a new review of the possibilities.
He looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and courtesy and disappeared.
I thought I had handled it pretty well, and that he would review the
alternatives and agree that mine was best. Imagine my surprise when,
some time later, I found out he had come up with an improved design. This
first contact with Jake, as we all called him, turned out to be typical. He
was curious and courteous, did his homework, and came up with an
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improved design. Neither of us realized at the time that this first meeting
was the beginning of a long and effective partnership.
As Jake describes at greater length in this memoir, we came to
know each other well while working with IBM in Poughkeepsie, New
York. In this short time Jake had become one of the senior MIT design
engineers. IBM had the job of engineering design and manufacture of the
SAGE computer under Lincoln's overall technical direction. "Direction"
meant traveling to Poughkeepsie every week and arguing out the design
with the IBM engineers. Public transportation was inconvenient and we
usually drove, a 4 1/2-hour trip. This meant leaving Boston at 5:00 in the
morning and starting work at IBM at about 9:30. A day or two later we
would leave Poughkeepsie at about 6:00 P.M., arriving home around
11:00. Over the course of a few months, we all had a chance to ride with all
members of the group. After exhausting the technical discussions, we
naturally turned to each other's personal lives and backgrounds.
Jake was especially adept at telling stories of his early life in
North Dakota. The snow, the grain elevators, and the poached deer all
came alive to us in the dark car in the Connecticut hills. My clearest
recollection, however, is of his tales of his education at "Meat Boners"
college. I almost came to believe there was such a place and that the people
of his hometown really did go down to the station to see him off, the local
boy setting forth to make good in the big world.
We took turns driving, and Jake's turn always raised my anxiety
the most. We would be moving fast, and ahead would be a stoplight with a
line of cars. It was absolutely inevitable that we had to stop, but Jake
would keep speeding on, talking all the while, and at the last possible
moment, he would cram on the brakes and come to a shuddering stop. He
maintained that he had learned to drive this way in North Dakota where
there were few cars and no stoplights, and where coming to a stop was
considered an emergency procedure. His part of North Dakota was laid out
in sections and he claimed that he had trouble with turns because he hadn't
learned to make them until he left home. That may be true; but as far as I
know, he never had an accident.
Not long after this, we began to cope with the problems of being
a relatively small group at Lincoln without legal authority, trying to
maintain technical control of the very large SAGE program involving
many government agencies and many contractors. The usual approach to
such a problem is authoritarian: decide what to do, tell everybody to do it,
and make sure that they do. It wasn't at all clear that we wanted to run
things that way, and it wasn't at all clear that Lincoln could make its orders
stick if we tried. There were too many others and too few of us. Jake came
up with the idea of the Systems Office, whose job it was to find and foresee
problems and to get the large masses of people involved to understand and
agree on appropriate action. Jake's view was to use leadership. He would
analyze the problems, propose solutions, and get everybody together to
agree. "Thousand-man meetings," they were called. They worked
because everyone wanted the problems solved and no one (besides us)
wanted to take responsibility for the whole system. Success was dependent
on sound and thorough homework, however, and this is where Jake
excelled. His willingness and his ability to do whatever was necessary to
make a program come out right were his most distinguishing characteris-
tics and among the chief reasons he played such a major role in the design
of SAGE and in the creation of The MITRE Corporation.
Once the SAGE hardware was well under way, Jake assumed
direction of the software part of the job. The specification and preparation
of the necessary computer programs turned out to be an enormous under-
taking. The Lincoln group of less than one hundred, which had been
preparing operational, test, and support programs for the prototype, was
augmented by a new organization, System Development Corporation,
with thousands of new and untrained people. Overnight, the Lincoln
people became supervisors and Jake's skills were needed to make the new
situation work. He dove in with his usual combination of friendliness,
firmness and hard work. I used to go to his organizational meetings from
time to time and noticed that the charts on his, blackboard were filled with
misspelled names. He maintained that he had never learned to spell, but I
felt no one could be that bad and accused him of deliberately misspelling in
order to cover up his real mistakes. I now think I was right but for the
wrong reason. He had many new people to deal with and was bound to
misspell some names. But, he deliberately misspelled many, not to cover
up for his mistakes but so that no one would feel too unimportant to be
spelled correctly. He was concerned about them, not about himself.
Throughout our careers at both Lincoln and MITRE, we were
called upon to work with many Air Force officers at all levels. In such
situations there is always tension between the need for indepen-
dence, which is necessary to maintain quality and effectiveness in the long
run, and the need for responsiveness, which is necessary to maintain
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