SAGE, SABRE and the Airline Industry
Military funding lead to the invention of the modem and other data communications technologies for a North American defense system. This grid of radar and other sensors connected to central computers with over a million miles of telephone line. Its headquarters would later be located deep within the Colorado Cheyenne Mountains and be the model […]
How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.4: SAGE and Early Electronic Computing
The SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system conceived at MIT and built at IBM’s Poughkeepsie, New York facilities helped transform the computer from a bulky, slow, vacuum-tube switched numerical processor into a generalized, software-driven, transistor-enabled, media-enhanced computer with an accompanying communications system able to send digital data over telephone lines.
HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 1.3
Containment would transform the telegraphic political economy, based on the telex and telephone into a computer-mediated world environment that linked banks and foreign exchange markets, connected global markets and production facilities, and integrated radar into the first computerized command and control system that would later become NORAD