About the very first software company and the largest software project in US history

Introduction

This article is a compilation from several sources of information about the very first software company, as well as the largest software project in US history - the SAGE project.

Story

In order to understand the context in which the SDC came into being, we need to return in August 1949, when the United States received intelligence that the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb. Suddenly it turned out that the United States was completely defenseless against the “Soviet threat”, since the Soviet Union had bombers capable of flying over the North Pole and dropping a bomb in the very center of the country (for notes from the translator, see the end of the article). The best that America could counter this attack was the early warning system of approaching bombers using radar and the immediate expulsion of fighters to intercept. However, as of 1949, the US air defense could not cope with this task, since the entire data collection from the radar systems was conducted manually, and the radar systems themselves were created during the Second World War. By the time the interceptor is in the air, the bomb will already be on the ground.

To audit the US air force in December 1949, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Military-Air Force created a commission chaired by George W. Valley, Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a report submitted by the Valley Committee (Valley Committee's Report), it was recommended to upgrade the entire air defense system, put in place an improved interceptor model, deploy anti-aircraft missile and anti-aircraft artillery complexes, expand the area covered by radar, and automate the entire data processing process, concentrating it special command centers. As a result of the last recommendation, the largest computer and software project in the history of America was born.
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The United States Air Force approved a report from the Valley Commission, and in December 1950, MIT was contracted to conduct research in the field of air defense and to develop a prototype computerized system. The project, which was later called Project Lincoln (Project Lincoln), was worked on by specialists from the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT. For the prototype of the system, Whirlwind was chosen as a prototype computer developed by MIT . Computer Whirlwind was chosen not so much due to the fact that it was created in MIT (which of course was very convenient), but rather because of the requirement that the computer could process data in real time. At that time, the Whirlwind computer was the only machine in the world capable of doing this; it was 10 times faster than any other similar machine, existing or developed at that time. During 1952, a prototype anti-aircraft system based on the XD-1 computer, the industrial version of the Whirlwind computer, was created. Using a prototype, data from the radar installed in Cape Cod was processed. The system was controlled by 30 US Air Force operators. They were sitting at consoles, equipped with large CRT displays, which were digitized data. These data on the screen could be selected for tactical analysis using a light pen.





Based on the test results of the Cape Cod system, it was decided to deploy a full-scale air defense network throughout the country. The new system is called SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), which literally means "semi-automatic ground environment." The adjective “semi-automatic” emphasized what tasks the person and the machine performed in this system: computers had to perform high-speed data processing, and people were responsible for making decisions based on this data. Many defense contractors were involved in the development of the system. The main contractor was Western Electric, and IBM, RCA, Bendix, General Electric, Bell Labs and Burroughs acted as subcontractors in various areas: radar, computers, communication lines, technical analysis. Mass production of XD-1 computers was entrusted to IBM. The car, which was given the code name AN ​​/ FSQ-7, and more often it was called simply Q-7, weighed 250 tons, had 49,000 lamps in its design and consumed 3 megawatts of electricity. During its existence, the SAGE project has brought IBM $ 500 million in revenue to the company, and at the peak of its development, it employed from 7,000 to 8,000 employees - 25% of the company's workforce. Thomas Watson Jr. (Thomas Watson Jr.), who inherited the IBM CEO from his father, later recalled that “The Cold War helped IBM become the king of the computer business.” However, IBM supplied only hardware. Despite the fact that the companies offered to create software for the system, IBM abandoned this task. Later, one of the managers of the company explained this by the fact that "according to our calculations, the software project will require the involvement of several thousand people ... we could not figure out where we could have 2,000 programmers after this project was completed." Bell Labs also received the offer, but it also rejected it.

The Cape Codd Test System contained 35,000 instruction teams, but the difference between the test system and the full SAGE program was the same as “the difference between the test lab and the actual production”. While the Cape Codd system was a one-of-a-kind program created by a select group of experienced engineers, the SAGE system would have to involve inexperienced programmers and create a common program that could be easily reconfigured and deployed on more than 20 installations. In the absence of a private contractor willing to take on this difficult task, RAND Corporation, a government non-profit organization, was involved. RAND Corporation (from the words "research and development") was created in Santa Monica (Santa Monica) as early as 1948 as a "think tank" of the US Air Force, engaged in research in the field of "methods of air warfare", which included a fairly wide range of topics: from the security of communications to the psychology of human interaction with the machine. RAND has already taken part in the SAGE project: it has trained Air Force personnel on an experimental system in Cape Cod Bay. Over the next 8 years, RAND was also engaged in staff training and programming of the SAGE system.

In December 1955, RAND established the independent Systems Development Division, which was exclusively programming. At that time, the corporation numbered 10 percent of the best US programmers, which was only 25 people. It was calculated that in the USA there were no more than 200 free programmers who would be able to issue the highest-class code, and 6 times more professional programmers who worked on relatively simple commercial applications.

It became clear that much more programmers would be needed to complete the project, and RAND didn’t even know how much exactly the programmers needed. In February 1956, a hiring manager was hired, and he immediately launched an advertising campaign throughout the country in professional magazines, newspapers and on the radio. A recruitment office was opened in New York, and entire teams traveled around the country in search of talent. The process of recruiting programmers was at a speed of 50 people per month, but few of the recruits were a real programmer. It was decided that it is better to recruit not the actual programmers, but such people who are easily trained in programming. Most of the recruits were men between the ages of 22 and 29, most of whom were college graduates in a wide range of disciplines. (“The teachers of music were especially good”). Although there was no shortage of volunteers, only less than a quarter of them passed the initial testing and got a job. During the selection, a three-day complex of tests for psychology and thinking was used, which turned out to be a very effective way of identifying a person's programming skills. After hiring, the recruit went to an 8-week training course on the Q-7 computer that IBM conducted and then another 8-week course that RAND itself conducted.

By October 1956, the staff of a subsidiary of the System Development Division exceeded the staff of the RAND Corporation itself. Therefore, it was decided to separate this division into a separate non-commercial organization, which was called System Development Corporation (SDC). The following year, SDC moved into a building with a total area of ​​250,000 square feet built specifically for her in Santa Monica. A crowd of programmers and the Q-7 computer just acquired were occupied by this whole area. The computer, by the way, consumed 1/20 of the electricity in the city of Santa Monica. In the fall of 1957, Lincoln Lab programmers moved to this new building. Here is what the SDC corporation historian writes, whose lines resemble the style of the novels of John Steinbeck: “All pro-ramists from the east coast — more than 500 families along with all their belongings — were transported to Santa Monica on special trains. Some of them were returning home; many of them saw the State of the sun and oranges in the first in life. All of them settled in California, some of them formed the core of the programmers of the SAGE project, and some of them supported the staff of training course instructors. ” By 1959, more than 700 programmers worked on the SAGE project and more than 1,400 people served them. This number was half of all programmers in the United States.

The SAGE program for completing the work contained more than a million instruction-commands and was the largest program of its time. 230.000 instructions constituted the program itself; 870.000 instructions - support programs and utilities. The programming mode was very thoughtful for its time, a lot of effort was invested in developing the discipline for managing software projects, as well as developing tools that helped write and test the hundreds of modules that the system consisted of. The project was completed a year later than planned, and the project cost was $ 50 per line of code. As it became clear later, the delay in the completion of the project was not at all due to the inefficiency of the non-profit organization; This was typical of any software project of this magnitude.

In June 1958, the first command center SAGE was put into operation. Here is how Newsweek described it:

Inside the concrete box without a single window based on McGuyer (New Jersey), the USAF launched a huge electronic computer this week. Beside him are sitting in rows of operators, bent over the screens of locators, on which white-yellow images flash.

With the speed of lightning and the unmistakably electronic heart of the SAGE system, it helps the human brain, which is so often prone to error and slow reaction. For the first time, the electronic brains of the SAGE system were connected to the network with early-warning radars, all-weather interceptor jets, rocket launchers, patrol ships, ground observation stations, protecting the life and tranquility of 44 million Americans in the New York air defense sector.



A total of 23 command centers were created, which were linked into a single national defense system.

Since then, SDC has changed from pure programming to support and deployment. Each new command center opened about once every two months. For software deployment, SDC sent a group of 100 software programmers. After the system was deployed and launched, 8 technical personnel were constantly working in the control center, as well as several instructors to train the military to work on equipment. By 1959, 400 programmers and 200 instructors worked in the field. At the same time, an in-line production system was created at the SDC office in Santa Monica, which allowed us to produce different versions of the program for various computer configurations and system requirements. By 1962, when the system was fully deployed, the total cost of software was $ 150 million — an impressive amount, but this is only 2 percent of the total value of the entire SAGE system, which was $ 8 billion.

Since the deployment of the system was less interesting than programming itself, talented programmers began to leave the SDC corporation. Highly qualified specialists immediately found application to their talents. In 1958, staff turnover was 20 percent. “By the end of 1960, with 3,500 workers on the SDC, there were already 4,000 former employees of the SDC; By 1963, with a staff of 4,300 workers, 6,000 former employees of SDC had already worked for other US companies. ”Only 50 percent of SDC programmers remained at SDC after 4 years of work, and only 30 percent after 7 years.

The search for a replacement for the dismissed was a special challenge for the SDC, but later what the president of the corporation said: “Our corporation became a university for programmers — this was partly our task, as a non-profit organization. So in those days we did not intend to prevent our employees from moving to other companies and were not going to offer higher wages than potential employers offered them. "It was later stated that" in 1970, in any large data processing project you could have found at least one person who once worked on the SAGE project. ”

By 1960, although the SAGE project was already coming to an end, SDC continued to grow, taking part in other military and government projects. By 1963, SDC had 4,300 employees, and in addition to the Santa Monica office, the company had seven more offices in seven different cities in the country. The company’s computer center already had two Q-7 computers and several IBM 1401 computers — the largest set of computing power in the world. The company's annual profit amounted to 57 million dollars, which were obtained from participation in 45 projects. Some of them were US Air Force projects, some were NASA, some were Civil Defense Departments, and a few more were DARPA agencies. Corporation SDC at that time was the largest enterprise for the production of software in the United States.

Finally

• In 1949, the Soviet Union did not have the means to deliver a nuclear bomb to the United States. Yes, and the nuclear bomb itself, and not a simple nuclear device, was only attacked by the USSR on October 18, 1951. The Tu-16 aircraft, capable of performing such a task, appeared only in 1954.
• The SAGE project, despite its successful completion, is considered a failure, since by the time the project was completely completed, the USSR adopted intercontinental ballistic missiles (the R-7 rocket in 1960), against which the SAGE system was completely powerless
• The last command center SAGE was closed in 1983

Links

1. SAGE article on English Wikipedia
2. Lincoln Labs website with SAGE story
3. IBM about SAGE in a promotional video on Youtube