NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966
flashbak.com
flashbak.com
While a lot of the basic research existed on paper, turning that into functional 24/7 systems at mega-scale was an almost unimaginable engineering challenge. The fragments which already existed were little more than one-off prototype computers like ENIAC, none of which were remotely close to big enough, fast enough or reliable enough. So they were faced with creating pretty much the full stack from transistors to storage to networking to displays - all of which had to be several generations bigger, faster and better than anything that had ever been shown to even sort-of work on a lab bench. While the budgets were huge, the requirements were equally insane and there was huge pressure to deliver it ASAP. And "it" had to actually work and then be built, deployed and operated daily across dozens of locations. It ultimately involved dozens of huge companies, hundreds of sub-contractor firms and tens of thousands of people. Pretty much everything I'd ever heard about in 1960s computing, when I dug into where the fundamental tech came from, ended up tracing back to enabling something the air defense network needed in the 50s.
I came away realizing the mid-60s scalable commercial computing industry I think of as my ancestral 'up-line' in computing, the 360/PDP systems which led to the 1970s 8-bit microprocessors which led to the 80s home computers anyone could own, would have all been at least a decade later without the crazy mad dash in the 1950s to enable the air defense build-out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
https://sage.mitre.org/ (see also links at the end)
SAGE also pioneered user interface technology, for example:
The first pointing device: https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=727
The first naked lady on a computer: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-n...
And bits of the machinery went on to a long and varied career in film and TV: https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.php?c=73
Any system of human controllers talking to human pilots would not be up to the task. Even a one-second delay would have meant a missed intercept. They needed machines to make the calculations and issue the orders. Those same machines eventually even controlled the interceptors directly, interacting with onboard radar/autopilot systems to remotely steer fighters into position.
Things would be/are very different today. Long-range air-to-air missiles/radar mean fighters do not need sub-second navigation accuracy to intercept fast targets. Air-to-air refueling also means fighters can loiter in position rather than panic-launch from the ground. Pilots today would balk at the idea of having a computerized ground controller drive "their" aircraft. It is now an unnecessary and alien concept.
Had missile and airborne radar tech advanced a little faster, maybe a little less than a decade, NORAD may not have asked for all those computers. Who knows what the world would look then like today. Get the sparrow (Aim-7) missile ready in 52 instead of 58 and maybe the computer revolution happens much more slowly.
He got his start because he had a security clearance and knew how to install and repair ccd camera systems do he did so for rocky flats and Cheyenne mountain. Then they asked him to build a box that had a film video camera that would take images of a crt display for record keeping. This was before it was possible digitally. So he did, he made 2. Then they needed a lift to bring down the Hughes projectors they used in Cheyenne mountain, the old kind with 3 color crt projectors. It needed to drop down the projector so they could change it out in less time than it took a nuke to come from Russia, so he did. He founded a company to keep making them, they still make them to this day.
So many companies were set up on the back of this cutting edge stuff, as well as Mercury and Apollo, satellites, nuclear reactors, submarines, jet liners, the SR-71, the Heavy Presses, it just goes on and on. Everything from one guy in a barn up to huge corporate labs. Obviously the war already boosted a lot of stuff, but the Atomic Age atmosphere must have felt like an unstoppable industrial whirlwind.
Even though the recent AI hype has been pretty feverish, it doesn't seem like we have had the same kind of top-to-bottom hopeful dynamism.
The US before WW2 was a regional power. After WW2 it was the only country still standing. This led to decades of unprecedented GDP growth.
I try to warn people about what it means when Asian countries have 30 years of GDP growth of 7% year on year but it barely registers.
Reagan was the reaction IMO. We really screwed ourselves in the 70s. Reagananomics, the 1980s (and beyond) financialization of everything, selling the bottom layers of the economic pyramid overseas piecemeal so that stonks could go up and consumers could buy cheaper junk, I see those that more of a reaction. The money and effort poured into those endeavors because it could no longer make a return on industrial endeavors.
Vietnam cultural problems came home to roost as did divisive civil rights era race baiting, 1st generation welfare systems (which I know it sounds hard to believe, but were way worse than today in terms of cliffs and disincentivizing productiviety) proliferated, oil crisis, stagflation, a whole bunch of the industrial economy which had been built out around/during WW2 was nearing "reinvest or shut it down" age right at the same time that stuff got regulated to high heaven and the oil crisis hit. As much as people complain about Gen Z being lazy/unmotivated, the hippie boomers were even worse as a workforce (and even more dominant due to the birth rate lull and spike of the depression and ww2).
Even in the 70s/80s, some prototypes were hardwired.
"Closing the iris."
There will never be another SG-1
"Unscheduled offworld activation"
For a few years after the downfall of the USSR and before 9/11, there were public tours. That was a happy, peaceful time.
Here's a partial tour from the 1970s.[1]
There is no one big control room. There are about a half dozen control rooms with different functions. There are duplicate control rooms outside the mountain, and for a few years, those were primary and the mountain only had a skeleton staff. Not any more. (Although Hegseth apparently wants to move some operations to Huntsville, Alabama.)
Modern photos are available. Modest sized rooms with flat screens on the walls, desks, ordinary monitors, and keyboards. About the only unusual thing is that there's video switching, so that monitors can be copied to a big screen, or someone else's screen, when something is happening and many people need to focus on one screen.
There's now a vast flood of crap AI art and mislabeled clickbait for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Sorting out the real from the fake is becoming harder.
(One of my career achievements from my aerospace days was managing to avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.)
Well, all the cool kids were apparently doing "Deep space radar telemetry" :)
(Those guys were around. I worked at a location in Silicon Valley which had a 20 meter steerable dish in the parking lot, the prototype for others around the world.
The Colorado Springs guys were trying to migrate off the DEC PDP-11 to some kind of microprocessor. The PDP-11 (16 bit address space) was very popular with the USAF/intel crowd. Making add-ons and plugging them into the bus was a fully documented and supported procedure, not a hack. DEC sold all the parts needed for that. The usual setup was one or more PDP-11 machines connected via a custom interface to something exotic. In the early 1980s, it was time to go to a microprocessor. But what?
They picked the Zilog Z-8000 [1], because it was the closest thing to a PDP-11. That turned out to be a dead end, but the aerospace company was already building custom interface hardware that talked to it, so they were stuck for the duration of separate projects. Did not end well. At one point I did get TCP/IP onto a pair of Z-8000 based Oynx machines, which were for a brief period the lowest cost UNIX boxes.)
:D
It's a real-world thing, which is probably where the Stargate writers got it. Precise satellite positions used to be determined by ground stations sending up a pseudorandom stream to an analog transponder and correlating the returned signal to get a delay. Multiple stations give you accurate positions. The USAF had about a dozen stations worldwide for that, and pictures of the locations, from Arctic to tropical island, were a common wall decoration where I worked. Central control was at the now-demolished Blue Cube [1] at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley back then, and moved out to Colorado Springs decades ago.
It's like GPS in reverse. Satellites of that era were rather dumb. The satellite end used is pure analog. The clocks and compute were on the ground. Satellites were told what to do in great detail by the ground, via a labor-intensive process which looked way too much like 1960s NASA well into the 1980s.
Today, Starlink satellites are semi-autonomous. They're kicked off the booster and mostly figure out by themselves where to position and aim. Progress marches on.
[1] https://heritageparkmuseum.org/blog/what-is-the-blue-cube
But I did get to go down the tunnel and through the blast door.
A few are preserved today as Cold War museums, but most are sealed off and occasionally become high-value locations for British urbexers on the odd occasion access becomes available. Historically there was a subculture around exploring such places and documenting them for posterity, but YouTube kind of ruined it by making interesting abandoned sites magnets for vandals and attention-seekers which is the last thing you want in those places.
The ROTOR bunkers would take a braver man than me to explore though, they're often burned out, flooded, and full of asbestos with all the interesting 1950s tech long removed. Not to mention they're often located on farmland where the landowners are fed up of said YouTube crowd traipsing around.
Comparing these images of the COC to what was reimagined for War Games really feels underwhelming. From the few images, it just feels very complex and overloaded with information that is just a lot to take in. Maybe it gets easier to deal with when that's what you do everyday, but it definitely has that feel of "designed by an engineer" instead of "designed by a UI professional". Essentially, it feels like every single UI I've ever made.
Everything is simplified down to a stupid hamburger menu if you want to do anything off the happy path.
I don't think the President would have gone to Cheyenne wouldn't have been time since Colorado is quite far from Washinton D.C - iirc the plan was always kneecap (NEACP[1]) once it was online (and it still is).
They obviously don’t discuss it for obvious reasons but given the options I’d say east then either north or south, Canada is nearer and air fields with sufficient length to be able to land (and is in NATO) which is why it’d be my guess at least to start with, loiter over an unpopulated area and at least the likelihood is reduced of been near a detonation is reduced, the continental US simply has too many targets, though with modern warheads been lower yield they’d likely be OK orbiting unpopulated areas out west I guess.
Yeah, the Loonies in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" keep pounding away at it with space rocks launched from the Moon. It worked in the end, overall.
pretty much the plot of Dr Strangelove
"Walking out of the theater, Ellsberg turned to his friend, another nuclear denizen, and said, “That was a documentary.”"
Makes sense the idea that your entire war plan hinges on one guy is stupid.
It's not the same as something like Threads (1984) to me.
This is easily the best, inadvertent advertisement ever for boosting the nation's missile defense capabilities, and it's ironic that it came out of progressive Netflix studios, given that progressives have insisted since the 80s that missile defense is a worthless, impossible ("like hitting a bullet with a bullet") MIC boondoggle. Thanks, Netflix!
Unlike SpaceX's scenario, though, you've got an enemy involved, with a vested interest in defeating the system. SpaceX would have substantially more trouble landing if the landing ships had decoys and evasive maneuvers. It's probably viable against current North Korea, or "whoops we launched just one". It's probably not ever viable against Russia or China doing a full-on attack.
(In other words, it's like hitting a bullet capable of hiding and making evasive maneuvers with a bullet.)
Iran's attacks on Israel demonstrated this pretty well; some missiles still got through. Interceptors are expensive, often more so than the rounds they're intercepting.
That of course wasn't possible, only a best effort. There was also the pseudo belief that ICBM missiles could be intercepted, and an entire system was designed and deployed (Project Nike), then decommissioned in 1974 due to it was a waste of money.
Two real US Air Force Chief's of Staff appeared on Stargate SG-1 as themselves -
Generals Michael E. Ryan and John P. Jumper.
Correcting for K2, which is the semi-autonomous placement for oxygen attenuation, at a series of heights.
And K8, with the proper credential, accessed either on the southern face, which is the prescribed route for border authorities.