SAGE Project

SAGE Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a US Air Force Air Defense system operated from the late fifties to the early eighties. The system, consisting of a network of about two dozen IBM AN/FSQ-7 (Whirlwind) computers, three radar detection networks and hundreds of operators, tracked and identified air craft approaching the US and Canada. Operators viewed, in real time, aircraft track information computed from multiple radar tracks, used light guns to pinpoint specific tracks of interest and plot intercept coordinates, and vectored fighter interceptors to them. SAGE was also capable of comparing tracks with filed flight plans to detect aircraft for which no information was available. SAGE is widely regarded as a land mark system in computer engineering because it used, non-experimentally, so many technologies critical to IT today, such as real time systems, interactive user interfaces, networked systems and large scale system integration, common data access, modular design and high reliability.

A more in depth article about SAGE.

For further information see http://www.mitre.org/about/sage.html