SAGE goes on duty
On 1 July 1958 the first AN/FSQ-7 direction centre was declared operational at McGuire Air Force Base. The machine took in radar data, assembled a single picture of the air situation from it, and guided weapons onto targets.
Why it matters
The first system in which a machine did not advise a human but held the picture of the field and directed weapons across it. Everything now called intelligent battle management has its ancestor here, ten years before the first expert systems and forty before the phrase "data fusion".
Lincoln Laboratory describes the system's purpose as three actions of digital computers: "(a) receive the radar and other information to detect and tract aircraft, (b) process the track data to form a complete air situation, and (c) guide weapons to destroy enemy aircraft." Development began in 1951 with the founding of Project Lincoln. IBM built the computers under contract, eventually 24 AN/FSQ-7 and 3 AN/FSQ-8 machines. Each weighed 250 tons, drew a 3,000-kilowatt supply and held 49,000 vacuum tubes. Fully deployed, the system ran to hundreds of radars, 24 direction centres and 3 combat centres across the country. The word "semi-automatic" in the name is not modesty: the decision stayed with a person while the machine built the picture and ran the interception. That boundary is what the next seventy years would argue about.