EDITOR Jonathan Grudin [e-mail]

John;Leslie;King’s;interest;in;history;was;evident;at;the;first;CSCW;conference;in;1986.;His;review;of;15;years;of research;with;technology;to;support;real-time;collocated;interaction,;then;called;Group;Decision;Support;Systems, revealed;that;we;sometimes;learn;more;slowly;from;experience;than;we;could.;In;this;article,;he;describes;the little-known;system;that;pioneered;real-time;human-computer;interaction;in;the;1950s,;created;the;computing profession,;and;trained;hundreds;of;its;earliest;practitioners.—Jonathan;Grudin

Project SAGE, a Half-Century On
John Leslie King

University of Michigan | [e-mail]

In 1959 a Project SAGE Sector Direction Center went live in Syracuse, NY. It was the first of more than two dozen such centers built in the U.S. and Canada. They were part of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, headquartered in the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain in the Colorado Rockies. Project SAGE cost more than the Manhattan Project (between $20 billion and $60 billion in today’s dollars, depending on how one counts), yet few people have heard of it. It never saw a single instance of what it was built to detect—an attack by Cold War adversary the Soviet Union—but deterrence would have been its greatest victory. Yet it launched the modern computer age in the U.S. As its peculiar name suggests, SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) was by design a human-computer system.

In 1945 the U.S. tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and ended World War II in the Pacific. The Yalta Conference that year raised British and American fears about Soviet ambitions following the war; the Berlin crisis of 1948 confirmed those fears. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb and unveiled the TU- 4, its first long-range bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons. That same year, the Western allies created NATO to counter Soviet expansion: a Soviet attack on any NATO member would be an attack on all. The Cold War was on.

NATO leaders anticipated Soviet attacks on the
ground from the east into Western Europe, by sea
from the west into the Pacific, and by air from the
north over Canada to the U.S. Project SAGE was
a response to the third scenario. In 1947 Canada
began erecting the Pine Tree Line, a set of radar
stations just north of major Canadian popula-
tion centers, connected by telephone to Canadian
air-defense centers. The risk rose as jet aircraft
flying low and fast could use the curvature of the
Earth to mask an attack until it was too late for air
defenses to respond. The answer? Move the radar
stations closer to the enemy. The Mid-Canada Line,
begun in 1952, moved detection several hundred
miles north. The U.S. joined the Canadian effort in
1955, helping to build the Distant Early Warning
(DEW) Line across Alaska and the Northwest
Territories near the Arctic Ocean in 1958.

September + October 2010