How does a
modern computer system with a light gun interface, built in cigarette lighter and ash tray sound? You could
protect yourself against pesky coughs while playing Duck Hunt. (If the hardware were capable.) Instead, how about an operating system of 1.5 million lines of code running on a veritable army of twenty four computers, requiring 50,000+ vacuum tubes and weighing 250 tons with
1/2 a megabyte of storage? All of this can be yours in a compact four story, concrete hardened package capable of processing data from all over the state and processing a whopping 75,000 instructions per second for the tune of $88,000,000! Need backup? Just put another one beside it! Available peripherals include autonomous gap fillers as well as nuclear tipped
Bomarc and
Nike missiles.(Peripherals not included.)
Here's the pitch as given in the late 1950s:
Bargain hunters would be best served to stick with their $99 4 ounce iPhone 4's capable of
2,000,000,000 instructions per second ....here are some other figures for comparison
| System |
Year(s) |
Calc/Sec |
Clock Speed |
RAM |
Storage |
| Semi Automatic Ground Environment |
1958 |
75,000 |
2.5mhz |
4k |
256k |
| Imsai 8080 |
1974 |
290,000 |
2mhz |
4k |
n/a |
| Super Nintendo |
1993 |
4.8 million |
3.58mhz |
128k |
32k |
I don't mean to diminish the impressiveness of the SAGE system by any means with the above comparison, by comparing the best of 1958 to systems in the past, it merely helps me appreciate that we now have the sum of knowledge (so far) more or less available at our fingertips using pocket sized computers reading ubiquitous radio waves that permeate our atmosphere in 2014...alas, I digress. SAGE replaced a manual radar system in which information was transferred by radio and sneakernet. It was developed out of necessity due to the threat of attacks coming at supersonic speeds. A Super Nintendo may be able to pull off sixty four times more calculations per second but SAGE was
still fast enough to track supersonic weapons as well as control and guide supersonic defensive measures. Examples of such measures would be the
Bomarc and
Nike missiles. It also had the capability to direct manned interceptors if the interceptors were so equipped.
The following is a layman's overview of the SAGE (Strategic Air Ground Environment) system's presence in Maine during the Cold War. In essence, the SAGE system was comprised of a series of radar stations held together by rudimentary digital computers and electronic
links that would gather complex spatial data based on
information from radar equipment and feed that information to a SAGE data
center . The SAGE data center held the two SAGE computers (one just in case the other shit the bed as computers are wont to do) which
compared
information from the various radar outposts to flight plans from the FAA
fed to it on punch cards. If an anomalous presence was detected it was
displayed on
a scope where an operator could designate the action to be taken with a
light gun. "Action to be taken" ranges from 'send up planes to
identify object' to 'press this button and start WWIII'
 |
| Sedgwick Gap Filler Building - Radomes.org |
Three big takeaways:
- For its time, SAGE was the
internet. Only one other electronic system existed at the time (globecom/stratcom) that was
capable of electronically carrying large amounts of information over
such long distances.
- SAGE was a big deal. No other system could give the armed forces a complete overview of all activity within specified airspace and automatically identify what didn't belong there.
- No other system could automatically communicate with manned and unmanned interceptors and coordinate defense based on real time data.
What's this got to do with Maine? Many Maine towns served as homes for centers of computing and communications for national defense. Caswell, Charleston, Brunswick and Machiasport all had manned radar outposts responsible for maintaining gap fillers and for keeping watch/feeding data to Topsham. Topsham in turn had communications links to the interceptor squadrons and missile defense systems in Bangor and Limestone. Some of this is still standing.
I've provided links to entries from Radomes.org and ColdWarRelics.com for each SAGE site since these two sites give you more information than I could here.
As each of these had their purpose and a role to play, each met their demise and many managed to drag life-giving economic opportunity with them for the towns that they were a part of. Topsham's SAGE data center site is now a soccer field for Mt Ararat high school, Charleston is the local juvie lockup, Caswell, Sedgwick, Topsfield and Bridgewater all sit derelict, falling apart just a little bit year by year. The Nikes and Bomarcs have been left in the past with only decrepit buildings to memorialize their roles. In fact the only site in the above list that's still even marginally active is Buck's Harbor AFS. It's part of the Air Force/FAA Joint Surveillance System,
much like the Nike fire control site in Caribou.
Also...here are some other neat resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment
http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/IBM-SAGE-computer.htm
The "devil worship" story may have had the same origins as the vamp house story. -- Many of the tunnels in the area were apparently connected with "East Loring", aka the North River Depot and were filled in during the late 1950s when the wooden barracks were torn down.
