The Internet’s grandfather, an inventive fraudster with many descendants 

Lester D. Earnest, Senior Research Computer Scientist Emeritus, Stanford University

(les at cs.stanford.edu)

2014.01.25


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Please note that this is a work in progress and some parts will likely need to be expanded or otherwise modified. If you have any questions or see something that doesn’t look right please send a note to les at cs.stanford.edu.

Introduction

If you have read some of the hundreds of articles or books about the history of the Internet you likely have the impression that ARPAnet was the first interactive computer network, that it began operating in 1969 and that it was based on packet switching technology invented by the late Dr. Paul Baran, or by a British physicist, the late Dr. Donald Davies. You also might have heard that the point-and-click graphical user interface was invented by Apple or that it was really Xerox PARC or perhaps Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). You may also think that ARPAnet was developed by the U.S. Defense Department with the goal of it surviving a nuclear attack, that computer networking depended for its success on the introduction of personal computers, that social networking and blogging started in the new millennium and that “cloud computing” is a new idea. However none of that is true.

You may also have heard the crazy idea that Al Gore played a significant role in starting the Internet, but he actually did.

Some fairly accurate histories have been written but they seem to be a small minority and, of those, I have yet to find one that is reasonably complete in my view. This article is an attempt to fill some gaps based on my first-hand perspective. Among other things I and my colleagues initiated the development of the first computer network (SAGE, 1956) and the first general purpose computer network (ARPAnet, 1967), which later became the Internet. I also played central roles in creating the first spelling checker (1961), search engine (1961), autonomous road vehicle (1967), online restaurant reviews (1973), network news service (1974), and social networking and blogging services (1975) though the terms “social network” and “blog” did not come into use until about 25 years after that. For a more complete list of brags and some embarrassments see my Brags and belches.

The misinformation cited above is evidently attributable to three main things: changes in terminology over time, the tendency of authors to think that a given field started when they first engaged it, and the tendency of innovators to expand the scope of their contributions in retrospect. I share the latter two tendencies but, having entered the computer field in the 1950s, I have a longer perspective than most and have kept a lot of documentation from early activities, which tends to keep my feet on the ground.

Another of my goals in writing this account is to expose some of the more crooked financial scams involved in this evolutionary process and to point out that similar practices are continuing today.

The first computer network was an air defense system called SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) that was initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with financial support from the U.S. Air Force. I began helping design it in 1956 and it became a technological marvel that included six levels of packetized data communications networks that were more tightly connected than the later ARPAnet and Internet. I was assigned to design the guidance and control functions of missiles and manned interceptors based on my earlier experience, having graduated from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1953 and spent 3.5 years as an aviation electronics officer in the U.S. Navy, mostly doing simulations of flight control systems for aircraft using rudimentary digital computers.

By the early 1960s, SAGE networks spanned the U.S. and Canada, connecting twenty-three main computer sites. While it was a technological marvel it was also a gigantic fraud as an air defense system in that it had fatal flaws at multiple levels. However its flaws were kept secret from the public so as to enable the contractors to make enormous profits over a twenty-five year period, during which time SAGE evidently became the biggest military-industrial-political fraud of the 20th Century. President Ronald Reagan's later Strategic Defense Initiative was a close competitor for foolish wastefulness. Unfortunately their modern descendants are still going strong today.

Three good things did come out of SAGE based on further development in the MIT community in the early 1960s, which made ARPAnet possible:

Three additional significant developments made the modern Internet possible:

Proof that packet switching could work came out of a 1962 MIT PhD dissertation by Leonard Kleinrock and was then implemented by an academic coalition led by Dr. Larry Roberts, also from MIT, using contractor Bolt, Baranek and Newman (BBN), which also had close ties to MIT. After several years of development using a four site testbed it became operational in 1971.

The Internet Protocols, which facilitate interconnection of multiple networks and led to the Internet, were developed by Stanford research project started in1973 by Prof. Vinton Cerf under the same DARPA contract used by my lab.

Beginning in 1990, at the instigation of Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, the World Wide Web facilitated information sharing over the Internet among academics, governmental and commercial agencies and the general public.

It is worth noting that the latter three developments were carried out by innovators who did not patent their work. In fact they altruistically gave away their ideas and assisted others in developing them further, which facilitated the rapid development of the Internet. If they had patented their work or developed it as part of a proprietary communication system the Internet would not exist as we know it today and various incompatible networks would be under the control of commercial or governmental agencies. Of course those agencies are doing their best to take control now but with any luck the Internet can keep spinning out of their control.

Given that ARPAnet grew up in a friendly academic environment and gave birth to the Internet, I view it as Mother of the Internet and since ARPAnet was spawned by SAGE, a military system, I view SAGE as the grandfather and its prototype, MIT's Cape Cod System, as the great grandmother, but that is enough genealogy for now. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out the gender of the Internet. It looks rather bi to me.

Who's the daddy? Speaking of sex, over the years there have been many articles identifying various people as the “Father of the Internet.” Some offer plausible arguments while others seriously distort the facts and quite a few are pure fiction. In any case, claiming that this technology has a human male parent is an example of sexist egotism. Why no mothers? And why must the parent be human?

Claiming that various people were the fathers of advanced technologies implies that they had sex with earlier feminine technologies. While robot prostitutes of both sexes are now becoming available and may dominate that market before long, for better or worse, they will not be able to produce viable offspring in the foreseeable future, so I suggest that claims of technological fatherhood by humans be dropped from public discussion. Besides, most military-industrial computer systems are useless bastards.

Overview of Networking. Looking at the modern Internet, with its rich collection of services that evolve daily and are accessible almost worldwide, you may be tempted to suppose it is the result of a careful long range plan. In fact the planning was incremental and this fortuitous outcome was the happy result of a number of separate inventions, discussed above, and a fair amount of luck.

Some mistakes were made along the way but fortunately this remarkable series of developments somehow kept going. I don’t think that anyone saw much beyond the next step as it developed, though some claim otherwise now. In any case, we now have a global public utility that keeps diversifying. There certainly will be further important developments from networking provided that governments and corporate interests that are striving to get control of it do not succeed.

Changing names. As mentioned above, one source of confusion about technological histories is changes in terminology. This article generally uses modern terms, which are not consistent with many older documents. Even if you have access to older documents you may find it difficult to learn about earlier versions of a given technology unless either you or your search engine knows about terminology shifts in that field. For example, modems were used for about twenty years before they began to be called that.

In the 1950s SAGE pioneered the use of modems for computer networking and used specialized forms of what we now call “packet switching,” a packet being a linear array of binary digits. The term “packet” was introduced in 1968 by Dr. Donald Davies and was later picked up by others, who started talking about “packet switching” in the early 1970s. Subsequently Dr. Davies and his supporters claimed that he invented packet switching, which was a fabrication. Dr. Davies proposed to build such a system but got only enough funding to build a simple Star network, which was far less sophisticated than what SAGE used earlier. Dr. Paul Baran also sought funding to test his scheme, aimed at a military communications system that could survive an attack on many of its links, but was unable to obtain it, so we will never know how it would have turned out. For some reason a number of people (not including Baran) then claimed that he had designed ARPAnet.

Another set of terminology shifts began with what was called “real time computing” in SAGE, which needed to process a lot of radar data in real time, though it was actually not able to do that right. The computer programs that were supposed to handle radar data also handled human inputs and showed the results within about three seconds, which was very fast compared with the batch processing computer systems then in general use, which took hours to days.

Based on a proposal by MIT Prof. John McCarthy, several groups in the MIT community and others then developed what came to be called “general purpose timesharing” which allowed a single computer to provide interactive services to a number of people concurrently. That development was an essential predecessor to computer networking and came into fairly widespread use in the mid-1960s. When ARPAnet was created later it was composed exclusively of timesharing systems of various types. Later still, as the World Wide Web came into use in the 1990s, all web services were provided by timesharing systems, which came to be called “servers”. More recently some marketeers introduced the term “cloud computing” and have pretended that it is a new invention even though it continues to be provided by plain old servers.

Beginning in 1965 I worked with John McCarthy and others to create a graduate-level computer research facility at Stanford University and I gave it the name Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in 1971. SAIL was primarily a research facility that produced many PhDs and sixteen winners of the ACM Turing Award, which is widely viewed as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science. Many participants were directly or indirectly involved in dozens of successful start-ups including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, D.E. Shaw and Associates and Amazon.com while still others played significant parts in the start-ups of Xerox PARC, Apple Computers as well as iRobot and Rethink Robotics though the latter two are primarily MIT spinoffs. Advanced technologies developed at SAIL also made major contributions to the growth of Digital Equipment Corporation and Yamaha.

Since nominally retiring in 1988 I have been an bystander to computer networking while continuing to support those who are trying to keep it going in the right direction in spite of the efforts of commercial interests to exploit us as well as politicians and other governmental authorities who wish to both control content and spy on us. It is interesting that governmental authorities often choose to snoop illegally but when someone snoops on them and exposes their misconduct they do their best to put that person in jail. Among the groups fighting back are the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Unfortunately that struggle will have to continue as long as the network remains useful.

Chronology. Below are some key inventions that made computer networks work.

1940s

These were mostly byproducts of World War II technological developments and the computers were generally specialized for certain tasks.

In 1949 Jack Harrington and his group at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center (AFCRC) in Massachusetts wanted to be able to view radar data from a remote site, but the bandwidth of radar video was too great to go over ordinary phone lines. They created a Digital Radar Relay that identified blips, located their centers and sent digital packets, one per blip, over a phone line to the display site. An improved version of the modem (not yet called that) was patented by Jack Harrington and Paul Rosen and became the basis of Bell Telephone’s A-1 Data Service. Harrington subsequently joined MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and helped design radar systems for SAGE.

1950s

All of these but the magnetic tape, drums, and disks and integrated circuits were first developed as parts of SAGE. Computers typically cost on the order of a million dollars each and were initially run by one user at a time until batch processing was developed, which allowed a series of computational tasks to be queued on magnetic tapes, providing results in hours to days.

1960s

Warning unheeded. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech as he left office in 1961 warning about the growing military-industrial establishment. He was mainly talking about SAGE, which was the biggest such system at that time though he didn't mention it by name. See his Warning of the military industrial complex, 1961.01.17, 2 ½ minute video.

However Eisenhower was ignored and SAGE went on to become the largest military-industrial-political fraud of the 20th Century as discussed below. Its “success” then spawned a horde of “Command and Control” systems that have been bilking American taxpayers ever since and are still going strong today.

Developments of all these but the mouse were also initiated at MIT and MITRE, drawing on the SAGE networking technologies.

The creation of practical interactive computing through timesharing spread from MIT to many other groups and ARPAnet was designed to work exclusively with timesharing systems. In this era interactions with timesharing systems was done through either teleprinters or simple display terminals either connected directly to a local timesharing system or over telephone lines with modems at each end.

Wes Clark 4 node no email

1970s

After ARPAnet got working in the early 1970s, so-called Terminal Interface Processors (TIPs) were added, mostly at U.S. Government facilities, that allowed anyone with a computer terminal and modem connected to a telephone line to connect to the TIP and link to any of the timesharing systems on the network, nearly all of which were at academic institutions. No identification or passwords were needed to get on the net and a number of the computer facilities allowed anyone to log in, including ours at SAIL. As a result, a number of bright high school students got online and were allowed to play. However they generally had to figure out how things worked on their own, which was facilitated by the publicly accessible documentation available on most systems, functioning much like the web sites introduced about twenty years later.

In 1976 DARPA offered to turn over ARPAnet to AT&T at no cost if they would run it but they rejected that proposal on the grounds that packet switching networks had no future! International communications organizations were laughing at ARPAnet inasmuch as they thought we were pursuing a bad idea. They eventually learned the hard way.

There is a 22 minute video on the beginning of general purpose networking that features the principal MIT contributors at the beginning, namely J.C.R. Licklider (known as “Lick” to his friends) who initiated the concept of interconnecting timesharing systems, Larry Roberts who oversaw the creation of ARPAnet and several other significant contributors. However you can ignore the comments by Dr. Donald Davies whose only contribution was the introduction of a new term: packet.

1980s

Personal computers and laptops were inevitable results of the many advances in manufacturing technologies as predicted by Moore's Law and made it easier for individuals to connect to the growing Internet but did not offer any new services to speak of since their operating systems either emulated or actually used existing timesharing systems.

1990s

At this point networking was spreading into many aspects of business and government around the world while political censors began controlling the net in certain parts of the world.

2000s

2010s

Mythologies. All cultures seem to develop myths about their origins and the Internet is no exception. Each day new stories appear, some about recent developments and others about the more distant past. Upon closer examination some of these stories turn out to be pretty accurate while others are pure fiction, but most are a mixture of the two. I used to be surprised at how many inaccurate creation myths were appearing and attempted to refute some of them until I figured out that would be a full time job and would be rather unproductive.

Let me first review a commonly repeated Internet myth that came out of the U.S. Presidential campaign in 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush. As you may recall, the outcome of that election was resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in a rather mythical way.

Gory details. Many people like to think that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. Statements to that effect are typically delivered with a smirk and a giggle, implying that the speaker thinks he has said something clever. In fact, Gore claimed only to have taken the initiative in “creating the Internet,” which he actually did by rounding up financial support for it in the U.S. Senate. Had he not done that in a timely manner it might not exist today. The “invention” myth was created by his Republican opponents for political purposes, just as seems to happen in all elections. See the Internet of Lies on Snopes.com

Fantasy worlds. It is clear that telling tall tales is a natural human tendency and that some people don’t even know when they are lying. The reason is that even though we all must deal with reality to some extent in order to survive, we also spend much of our lives in fantasy worlds shaped by our culture, including personal philosophies, family values, community viewpoints, and our choices of religion or political party, if any. These things are augmented by a natural tendency by many people to brag.

This article attempts to present a fairly complete and accurate history of computer networking based on my somewhat unusual perspective but necessarily subject to my own fantasies and biases, though I like to think that I’m well grounded. I readily admit that my memory is imperfect, but I also happen to be a pack-rat, having kept filing cabinets and boxes full of documents from earlier times. Only occasionally am I surprised when I reread that material. However my observations below are admittedly a bit uneven because some inventions come with more interesting stories than others.

Keith Windschuttle says that each historian actually makes his own history. See The Killing of History, Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Now that you have been warned, I offer below my opinionated take on what happened. Please note that I do not claim infallibility; some of my past recollections have turned out to be false based on evidence discovered later. Catch me if you can!

The attractiveness of SAGE computer system was noticed by other military commanders, who decided that they too needed something like it. One of the earliest was General Curtis LeMay, who ordered one for his Strategic Air Command (SAC). It too turned out to be useless but the name used for that system profoundly affected further developments. It was originally called the “SAC Control System” but when that was written out fully as “Strategic Air Command Control System” the chance juxtaposition of “Command Control” somehow caught military imaginations and set off a major growth industry, as discussed in my millennium ACM article: E2A is worse than Y2K, CACM, July 2000.

How SAGE got started. It was a solution looking for a problem. Shortly after World War II the U.S. Navy contracted with MIT to develop a reprogrammable flight simulator that could be used for pilot training on a number of different aircraft. The MIT group set out to do that using electronic analog computer technology and called it "Whirlwind." After awhile they decided that emerging digital computation methods would work better and switched but still called it Whirlwind. After further developments, including the invention of magnetic core memory by the project leader, Prof. Jay Forrester, which revolutionized digital computing for about 20 years, they admitted that they could not meet the performance objectives and the Navy decided to terminate the funding, which would leave MIT with a bunch of interesting computer hardware but no way to continue.

MIT then formed a committee under to try to find another funding source and considered a number of possibilities including air traffic control based on automatic aircraft tracking from radar data, which they could have done well, but that part of the government wasn't buying then. At that point the U.S. Air Force had access to a lot of money through the enormous Defense budget and became their new benefactor. Both parties evidently agreed to overlook the fact that they could not track aircraft that used radar jamming, as all bombers have done since World War II. However that fact was kept secret.

It should have been clear to both MIT’s radar experts, who had participated in the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World War II, and those in the Air Force, who were quite familiar with electronic countermeasures that this automatic tracking scheme would not work. However the Air Force was apparently desperate to get a project going to counter their real enemy, the U.S. Army, which was developing a competing air defense missile system called Nike that actually worked.

MIT then sent their computer and radar people off-campus into the newly constructed MIT Lincoln Laboratory near Lexington, Massachusetts, where a prototype of the SAGE computer was built by IBM in accordance with the architecture specified by MIT. That architecture was a bit odd in that it had a split accumulator, which was good for dealing with Cartesian coordinates but not much else.

In December 1956, having completed my service in the U.S. Navy as an aviation electronics officer, I went to Lincoln Lab and was assigned to share an office with Paul Sinesi. When I asked what he did, he replied in a proper Boston accent, “I work on rada’ dater.” I knew that the SAGE air defense system was supposed to automatically track aircraft using radar data, so I asked “What do you do about electronic countermeasures?” “We don’t do that,” he said.

Based on my Navy experience I found that answer puzzling, since I knew that hostile bombers normally attempt to jam radars. Being new to the organization, however, I figured that I would later figure out how they dealt with this problem. In fact, as I subsequently observed, they didn’t deal with it and carefully designed all tests and demonstrations to avoid it. Thus SAGE was a gigantic fraud on taxpayers in that it was a “peacetime defense system” that would malfunction in an actual attack, much like France’s Maginot Line did in World War II.

This presented me with a dilemma. I had come to MIT because it was a hotbed of advanced computer technology but helping create a military-industrial-political fraud was unethical. Nevertheless I continued to work there for a time and learned that SAGE also had other major defects.

These problems were widely discussed in-house at the time but were kept secret from the public. Physicist Herman Kahn, who was then at RAND Corp., gave classified lectures on some of these matters.

Thus SAGE had several things in common with the mythical Forrest Gump: it was very fast, financially successful, and incredibly stupid. Those who liked to pretend that it fooled the Soviet Union into believing that we had a real defense system were smoking dope, since the Soviets were able to observe that all “tests” were performed without radar jamming.

How SAGE was supposed to work. Parts of SAGE were visually appealing and, because its major deficiencies were kept hidden from the public, Air Force propaganda soon convinced them that it was a technological breakthrough. The film cited below is an accurate depiction aside from its claim that SAGE actually worked. Western Electric, a branch of AT&T, was the biggest beneficiary of this fraudulent project. For a propaganda account see In your defense, 23 minute video by Western Electric, 1959.

SAGE operators were expected to receive advance warning of any impending Soviet manned bomber attack from the DEW Line (Distant Early Warning), a string of radars across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Iceland. When the incoming bombers would subsequently come into the view of SAGE radars they supposedly would be automatically tracked by SAGE and be shot down by either manned interceptors or BOMARC missiles.

.In order to do that, SAGE used six kinds of packetized data communications networks, each with different packet formats and specialized switching functions to perform the following functions. (Note, however, that you will not find the word “packet” anywhere in the SAGE literature since that term did not come into use until a dozen years later).

(1) Transmit radar data from many sites to the central computers in each geographic sector,

(2) Share aircraft tracks derived from radar data with adjacent Direction Centers,

(3) Issue launch commands to manned interceptors and ground-to-air missiles,

(4) Send guidance commands to airborne missiles and manned interceptors via packet radio systems,

(5) Send overview summaries to higher level Combat Centers having computers similar to those in the Direction Centers, and

(6) Later, forward situation summaries from Combat Centers to NORAD Headquarters (North American Air Defense Command, with "Air" later changed to "Aerospace"), a computer facility located deep underground in Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colorado, that oversaw U.S. and Canadian defense forces.

These were all “Star” networks (multiple sites connected directly to a hub) and each data link in each network was duplexed for reliability. That is, there were two land lines or microwave links for each connection that followed different geographical routes, so that it would be less likely that both would be disabled by a single bomb or other malfunction. A “black box” at the receiving end monitored the primary link and, if it malfunctioned, would switch to the backup. Magnetic drums were used to buffer these data links, so there were lots of spinning drums in each facility.

There was some redundancy in the packet formats so that transmission errors could be detected and the packet rejected but there were no provisions for ensuring that a given packet would get through to its destination because updates of the same information were being retransmitted at regular intervals.

SAGE Direction Center. Each main building had four floors, with many display consoles and a large screen display on the top floor, offices the next floor down, a computer room the size of a football field below that and power supplies, communications equipment and air conditioning on the bottom floor tied to cooling towers on the left.

Success in show business. The top floor of each SAGE site was a “blue room” filled with computer displays. The blue room was a major selling point for SAGE, having subdued lighting, scores of large, flickering CRT displays and a large screen display for the General, his staff and visiting dignitaries. It looked like a movie set and became one – from about 1960 on most Hollywood depictions of military command centers have been modeled after the SAGE blue rooms.

The computers used in each Direction Center, called the AN/FSQ-7, or Q-7 for short, were vacuum tube machines that were duplexed for reliability, so that one machine could be serviced while the other one was online and, if both were available, the standby machine could follow what the online one was doing and, in case of hardware failure, would swap roles quickly. This kind of “nonstop” computer system was later introduced for banking and other applications by Tandem Computers.

Each officer and his aide had a large geographic CRT display showing aircraft tracks, identities, altitudes and headings and an auxiliary textual display. Each such work station had a special keyboard for implementing decisions, a telephone, ash tray, and electric cigar lighter similar to those available in cars of that era. They also had a "light gun" containing a photocell mounted in a pistol grip that could be activated by pulling the trigger so that it would "see" flashes of light on the screen and activate appropriate computer processes. They were used to point-and-click on display elements, a scheme that was reintroduced about 20 years later using the less expensive mouse.

SAGE Weapons Director Console. Used to assign interception tasks to Intercept Directors, each having a similar console. The light gun, resting just below the display screen and shaped like a pistol, contained a photocell that could be pointed at any display element on the screen and be activated by pulling the trigger, equivalent to a modern mouse click, so as to activate a process. It could be used to start automatic tracking of aircraft by pointing at radar blips or to assign responsibility for a given interception task.

SAGE appraisal. Though SAGE was a fake air defense system from its inception, its deficiencies were kept secret so that it could be kept going for twenty-five years for the financial benefit of members of the military-industrial-political establishment. It also included plans to fire nuclear warheads in our own skies though the study of that idea revealed something rather embarrassing: see my BOMARC boners.

Weapons integration. Because I had come from a military aviation background I was assigned to do weapons integration for SAGE, which involved specifying intercept guidance calculations for various tactical approaches by manned interceptors and for direct interceptions by BOMARC missiles. I also designed the Intercept Directors’ work stations to select tactics and oversee interceptions, which were the most numerous consoles.

I had to negotiate with several aircraft company engineering representatives regarding how the guidance commands could either be displayed to pilots or optionally coupled to their autopilots so that the pilot could focus on launching air-to-air missiles at bombers. I recall that the engineering representative from Convair, which made the F-102 and F-106 manned interceptors, was outstandingly arrogant and tried to pretend he was in charge of everything, apparently a result of his being ex-military.

As we learned later, a young pilot named George W. Bush flew an F-102 interceptor under SAGE, based in Houston, Texas, from 1968 to 1972. This was reportedly arranged by his politically powerful father, George H.W. Bush, to keep him safely out of the war in Vietnam. Given that I had specified the SAGE guidance calculations a decade earlier it can be said that I gave him guidance, perhaps in the wrong direction. He seems to have learned that the military-industrial-political complex provides a plush lifestyle.

Divorce. In the late 1950s, MIT administrators found that negotiations with the Air Force were becoming increasingly difficult and they eventually decided to step away from SAGE in 1958 by spinning off a major part of the Lincoln Lab staff into a new nonprofit corporation called MITRE. I would like to think that this was the result of MIT’s realization that they had been participating in a gigantic fraud but I'm not certain of that. In any case, I and many others went along with that move.

Meanwhile, things changed in the new world of MITRE. Overall goals were no longer set by senior staff members but by Air Force officers who had almost no understanding of the technologies they were supposedly overseeing. Of necessity we adopted the Air Force way of doing things, in which the main objective was to spend all the funds for each project by the end of the fiscal year so as to ensure that a larger amount would then become available regardless of what, if anything, had been accomplished. Thus the development costs of SAGE and other projects soared further. Nevertheless SAGE somehow came to be regarded as the model of what the next generation of military systems should be. Never mind that it was useless – it looked good!

The main problem with all of those systems was that the objective was to computerize things regardless of whether that improved overall system performance. There were almost never any quantitative performance measures specified nor analysis made of price/performance measures of alternatives. They just hired a bunch of nerds and turned them loose!

Getting funding for these projects was enabled by public fears derived from the ongoing Cold War. In the 1950s there was a lot of public concern about the possibility of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union and this was encouraged by politicians and government officials in order to justify expansion of government powers and increases in Defense Department budgets. In urban areas, sub-basements of some buildings were designated as bomb shelters and signage was erected to show people how to get there. Civil Defense groups were organized in residential areas and some people built underground bomb shelters at their homes and stocked them with food and water so that they and their family might survive a nearby blast.

Those feelings of insecurity were further expanded when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which suggested that they were ahead of us in rocketry. That led directly to the creation of the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA, which later became DARPA, then ARPA again then DARPA again) and further increases in military budgets.

How much did SAGE cost? Western Electric, IBM, Burroughs and other contractors benefited greatly from their involvement in SAGE, both from direct financial payments and from learning about advanced technologies.

Western Electric learned from MIT how to build data links using modems, though when newer packet switching technology was introduced later as part of ARPAnet they opposed it along with their owners and partners, AT&T and Bell Telephone Laboratories, who claimed that it was inferior to their long-established circuit-switching systems. While Bell Labs clearly innovated in a number of areas, such as their invention of the transistor, they showed remarkable ignorance in the advancement of communications technology, which was supposed to be their specialty.

IBM received $30 million ($230 million in 2011 dollars) for each of the 56 computers they provided and more for their maintenance over many years, though their vacuum tube technology became obsolete about the time SAGE was first deployed. IBM also benefited by learning from MIT how to make magnetic core memories and promptly applied that technology to their main line of computers, though for some reason the IBM memories were only about half as fast as those designed by MIT. IBM also took the rudimentary timesharing scheme used by SAGE and used it to create the first online airline reservation system, called SABRE, for American Airlines using an IBM 7090 computer. It became partly operational in 1960 and fully operational in 1964.

Given that each SAGE computer used about 58,000 vacuum tubes, a lot of replacement tubes had to be purchased during their 25 years of operation. Ironically, as SAGE aged and transistors replaced vacuum tubes in most new electronic equipment, U.S. manufacturers stopped making tubes whereas that transition happened later in the Soviet Union. As a result Soviet tubes ended up being imported to keep SAGE running. Thus they too became beneficiaries of this massively expensive program that was supposed to defend against them.

The bottom line. I know of no comprehensive accounting of the cost of SAGE from its development phase through 25 years of operation. However the people who did most of the software development for SAGE have estimated that the cost of its initial development and deployment, mostly in the late 1950s, was around $8 billion, which was the equivalent of about $61 billion in 2011 dollars. See C. Baum, The System Builders, the Story of SDC, System Development Corp., Santa Monica, CA, 1981, Page 12.

In addition to that, there was the cost of operating and maintaining the system for 25 years which, because it operated 24/7, included hundreds of people at each of 23 Direction Centers and 3 Combat Centers as well as thousands of people operating and maintaining SAGE radar systems across North American and the DEW Line across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, including a number of Texas Tower radars off the northeastern coast of North America. In addition there were hundreds of manned interceptors, each costing millions of dollars, operating in squadrons distributed across North America and many BOMARC and Nike missiles that were kept at the ready. The overall cost was evidently somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars in modern terms.

Many corporations played a part in creating and maintaining SAGE including “nonprofits” MIT, MITRE, and SDC, which started it, as well as Western Electric which handled overall coordination. IBM provided the expensive computers, RCA, Bendix and General Electric built the radars, Burroughs made the radar digitizing computers and various aircraft manufacturers built hundreds of manned interceptors and missiles including Boeing, Convair, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas and others.

We likely will never know the total cost. However even if SAGE had worked it should have been shut down when the manned bomber threat was superseded by ICBMs in the early 1960s. Of course it actually never worked for the reasons discussed above, so it seems safe to say that it was the largest military-industrial-political fraud of the 20th Century. The useless SAGE system was kept going till 1983, thus sustaining the elegant lifestyle of its officers stationed at SAC bases around the country as well as providing large incomes to the various SAGE contractors, the lobbyists they hired, and big contributions to the political campaigns of supportive Senators and Congressmen.

People like to talk about the investment scandal perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, which cost investors about $65 billion and was apparently the biggest Ponzi scheme in world history. However SAGE took many times that amount from American taxpayers and apparently cost more than the sum of all Ponzi schemes in world history, but SAGE is just one of hundreds of fake or grossly overpriced systems paid for by the U.S. Defense Department and many are still bilking American taxpayers today. With a bit of careful cutting in this area, U.S. budget deficits could be ended in an instant. However the crooks who have been getting away with this for decades while keeping their schemes cloaked under “national security” will continue doing their best to block reforms and the public media are likely to continue ignoring this mess, being part of the conspiracy..