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ARPA at this point played an early role in Transit a predecessor to the Global Positioning System . "Fast-forward to 1959 when a joint effort between DARPA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory began to fine-tune the early explorers' discoveries. TRANSIT, sponsored by the Navy and developed under the leadership of Richard Kirschner at Johns Hopkins, was the first satellite positioning system."
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During the late 1960s, with the transfer of these mature programs to the Services, ARPA redefined its role and concentrated on a diverse set of relatively small, essentially exploratory research programs. The agency was renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1972, and during the early 1970s, it emphasized direct energy programs, information processing, and tactical technologies.
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Concerning information processing, DARPA made great progress, initially through its support of the development of time-sharing. All modern operating systems rely on concepts invented for the Multics system, developed by a cooperation among Bell Labs, General Electric and MIT, which DARPA supported by funding Project MAC at MIT with an initial two-million-dollar grant.
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DARPA supported the evolution of the ARPANET , Packet Radio Network, Packet Satellite Network and ultimately, the Internet and research in the artificial intelligence fields of speech recognition and signal processing, including parts of Shakey the robot. DARPA also supported the early development of both hypertext and hypermedia. DARPA funded one of the first two hypertext systems, Douglas Engelbart's NLS computer system, as well as The Mother of All Demos. DARPA later funded the development of the Aspen Movie Map, which is generally seen as the first hypermedia system and an important precursor of virtual reality.
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The Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited appropriations for defense research only to projects with direct military application.
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The resulting "brain drain" is credited with boosting the development of the fledgling personal computer industry. Some young computer scientists left the universities to startups and private research laboratories such as Xerox PARC.
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Between 1976 and 1981, DARPA's major projects were dominated by air, land, sea, and space technology, tactical armor and anti-armor programs, infrared sensing for space-based surveillance, high-energy laser technology for space-based missile defense, antisubmarine warfare, advanced cruise missiles, advanced aircraft, and defense applications of advanced computing.
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Many of the successful programs were transitioned to the Services, such as the foundation technologies in automatic target recognition, space-based sensing, propulsion, and materials that were transferred to the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization , later known as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization , now titled the Missile Defense Agency .
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During the 1980s, the attention of the Agency was centered on information processing and aircraft-related programs, including the National Aerospace Plane or Hypersonic Research Program. The Strategic Computing Program enabled DARPA to exploit advanced processing and networking technologies and to rebuild and strengthen relationships with universities after the Vietnam War. In addition, DARPA began to pursue new concepts for small, lightweight satellites and directed new programs regarding defense manufacturing, submarine technology, and armor/anti-armor.
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In 1981, two engineers, Robert McGhee and Kenneth Waldron, started to develop the Adaptive Suspension Vehicle nicknamed the "Walker" at the Ohio State University, under a research contract from DARPA. The vehicle was 17 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 10.5 feet high, and had six legs to support its three-ton aluminum body, in which it was designed to carry cargo over difficult terrains. However, DARPA lost interest in the ASV, after problems with cold-weather tests.
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On February 4, 2004, the agency shut down its so called "LifeLog Project". The project's aim would have been, "to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does".
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On October 28, 2009, the agency broke ground on a new facility in Arlington County, Virginia a few miles from The Pentagon.
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In fall 2011, DARPA hosted the 100-Year Starship Symposium with the aim of getting the public to start thinking seriously about interstellar travel.
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On June 5, 2016, NASA and DARPA announced that it planned to build new X-planes with NASA's plan setting to create a whole series of X planes over the next 10 years.
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Between 2014 and 2016, DARPA shepherded the first machine-to-machine computer security competition, the Cyber Grand Challenge ,
bringing a group of top-notch computer security experts to search for security vulnerabilities, exploit them, and create fixes that patch those vulnerabilities in a fully automated fashion. It is one of DARPA prize competitions to spur innovations.
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In June 2018, DARPA leaders demonstrated a number of new technologies that were developed within the framework of the GXV-T program. The goal of this program is to create a lightly armored combat vehicle of not very large dimensions, which, due to maneuverability and other tricks, can successfully resist modern anti-tank weapon systems.
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In September 2020, DARPA and the US Air Force announced that the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept are ready for free-flight tests within the next year.
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Victoria Coleman became the director of DARPA in November 2020.
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In recent years, DARPA officials have contracted out core functions to corporations. For example, during fiscal year 2020, Chenega ran physical security on DARPA's premises, System High Corp. carried out program security, and Agile Defense ran unclassified IT services. General Dynamics runs classified IT services. Strategic Analysis Inc. provided support services regarding engineering, science, mathematics, and front office and administrative work.
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DARPA has six technical offices that manage the agency's research portfolio, and two additional offices that manage special projects. All offices report to the DARPA director, including:
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A 1991 reorganization created several offices which existed throughout the early 1990s:
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A 2010 reorganization merged two offices:
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A list of DARPA's active and archived projects is available on the agency's website. Because of the agency's fast pace, programs constantly start and stop based on the needs of the U.S. government. Structured information about some of the DARPA's contracts and projects is publicly available.
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DARPA publishes a list of current research programs, and a list of archived programs.
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DARPA is well known as a high-tech government agency, and as such has many appearances in popular fiction. Some realistic references to DARPA in fiction are as "ARPA" in Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X , in episodes of television program The West Wing , the television program Numb3rs, and the Netflix film Spectral.
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The system's parent company is organized into three business units:
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Sabre is headquartered in Southlake, Texas, and has many employees in various locations around the world.
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The name of the travel reservation system is an abbreviation for "Semi-automated Business Research Environment", and was originally styled in all-capital letters as SABRE. It was developed to automate the way American Airlines booked reservations.
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In the 1950s, American Airlines was facing a serious challenge in its ability to quickly handle airline reservations in an era that witnessed high growth in passenger volumes in the airline industry. Before the introduction of SABRE, the airline's system for booking flights was entirely manual, having developed from the techniques originally developed at its Little Rock, Arkansas, reservations center in the 1920s. In this manual system, a team of eight operators would sort through a rotating file with cards for every flight. When a seat was booked, the operators would place a mark on the side of the card, and knew visually whether it was full. This part of the process was not all that slow, at least when there were not that many planes, but the entire end-to-end task of looking for a flight, reserving a seat, and then writing up the ticket could take up to three hours in some cases, and 90 minutes on average. The system also had limited room to scale. It was limited to about eight operators because that was the maximum that could fit around the file. To handle more queries the only solution was to add more layers of hierarchy to filter down requests into batches.
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American Airlines had already attacked the problem to some degree, and was in the process of introducing their new Magnetronic Reservisor, an electromechanical computer, in 1952 to replace the card files. This computer consisted of a single magnetic drum, each memory location holding the number of seats left on a particular flight. Using this system, a large number of operators could access information simultaneously, so the ticket agents could be told via phone if a seat was available. On the downside, a staff member was needed at each end of the phone line, and handling the ticket took considerable effort and filing. Something much more highly automated was needed if American Airlines was going to enter the jet age, booking many times more seats.: p.100
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During the testing phase of the Reservisor a high-ranking IBM salesman, Blair Smith, was flying on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles back to IBM in New York City in 1953. He found himself sitting next to American Airlines president C. R. Smith. Noting that they shared a family name, they began talking.
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Just prior to this chance meeting, IBM had been working with the United States Air Force on their Semi Automatic Ground Environment project. SAGE used a series of large computers to coordinate the message flow from radar sites to interceptors, dramatically reducing the time needed to direct an attack on an incoming bomber. The system used teleprinter machines located around the world to feed information into the system, which then sent orders back to teleprinters located at the fighter bases. It was one of the first online systems.
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Smith and Watson observed that the SAGE system's basic architecture was suitable for use in American Airlines' booking services. Teleprinters would be placed at American Airlines' ticketing offices to send in requests and receive responses directly, without the need for anyone on the other end of the phone. The number of available seats on the aircraft could be tracked automatically, and if a seat was available the ticket agent could be notified. Booking simply took one more command, updating the availability and, if desired, could be followed by printing a ticket.
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Thirty days later IBM sent a research proposal to American Airlines, suggesting that they join forces to study the problem. A team was set up consisting of IBM engineers led by John Siegfried and a large number of American Airlines' staff led by Malcolm Perry, taken from booking, reservations, and ticket sales, calling the effort the Semi-Automated Business Research Environment, or SABRE.
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A formal development arrangement was signed in 1957. The first experimental system went online in 1960, based on two IBM 7090 mainframes in a new data center located in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The system was a success. Up to this point, it had cost $40 million to develop and install . The SABRE system by IBM in the 1960s was specified to process a very large number of transactions, such as handling 83,000 daily phone calls. The system took over all booking functions in 1964, when the name had changed to SABRE.
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In 1972, SABRE was migrated to IBM System/360 systems in a new underground location in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Max Hopper joined American Airlines in 1972 as director of SABRE, and pioneered its use. Originally used only by American Airlines, the system was expanded to access by travel agents in 1976.
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With SABRE up and running, IBM offered its expertise to other airlines, and soon developed Deltamatic for Delta Air Lines on the IBM 7074, and PANAMAC for Pan American World Airways using an IBM 7080. In 1968, they generalized their work into the PARS , which ran on any member of the IBM System/360 family and thus could support any sized airline. The operating system component of PARS evolved into ACP , and later to TPF . Application programs were originally written in assembly language, later in SabreTalk, a proprietary dialect of PL/I, and now in C and C++.
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By the 1980s, SABRE offered airline reservations through the CompuServe Information Service, and General Electric's GEnie under the Eaasy SABRE brand. This service was extended to America Online in the 1990s.
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American and Sabre separated on March 15, 2000. Sabre had been a publicly traded corporation, Sabre Holdings, stock symbol TSG on the New York Stock Exchange until taken private in March 2007. The corporation introduced the new logo and changed from the all-caps acronym "SABRE" to the mixed-case "Sabre Holdings", when the new corporation was formed. The Travelocity website, introduced in 1996, was owned by Sabre Holdings. Travelocity was acquired by Expedia in January 2015. Sabre Holdings' three remaining business units, Sabre Travel Network, Sabre Airline Solutions and Sabre Hospitality, today serves as a global travel technology company.
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In 1982, Advertising Age reported that "United Airlines operates a similar system, Apollo, while Eastern operates Mars and Delta operates Datas." Braniff International's Cowboy system was considered by Electronic Data Systems for building an airline-neutral system.
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A 1982 study by American Airlines found that travel agents selected the flight appearing on the first line more than half the time. Ninety-two percent of the time, the selected flight was on the first screen. This provided a huge incentive for American to manipulate its ranking formula, or even corrupt the search algorithm outright, to favor American flights over its competitors in the results of flight search results, and the airline did not resist the temptation.
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At first this was limited to juggling the relative importance of factors such as the length of the flight, how close the actual departure time was to the desired time, and whether the flight had a connection, but with each success American became bolder. In late 1981, New York Air added a flight from La Guardia to Detroit, challenging American in an important market. Before long, the new flights suddenly started appearing at the bottom of the screen. Its reservations dried up, and it was forced to cut back from eight Detroit flights a day to none.
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On one occasion, Sabre deliberately withheld Continental's discount fares on 49 routes where American competed. A Sabre staffer had been directed to work on a program that would automatically suppress any discount fares loaded into the system.
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Congress investigated these practices, and in 1983 Bob Crandall, president of American, vocally defended the airline's preferential treatment of its own offerings in the system. "The preferential display of our flights, and the corresponding increase in our market share, is the competitive raison d'être for having created the system in the first place," he told them. The U.S. government disagreed, and in 1984 it outlawed the biasing practices for the search results.
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The fairness rules were eliminated or allowed to expire in 2010. By then, none of the major distribution systems was majority owned by the airlines.
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In 1987 Sabre's success of selling to European travel agents was inhibited by the refusal of big European carriers led by British Airways to grant the system ticketing authority for their flights even though Sabre had obtained IATA Billing and Settlement Plan clearance for the UK in 1986. American brought High Court action which alleged that after the arrival of Sabre on its doorstep British Airways immediately offered financial incentives to travel agents who continued to use Travicom and would tie any override commissions to it. Travicom was created by Videcom, British Airways and British Caledonian and launched in 1976 as the world's first multi-access reservations system based on Videcom technology which eventually became part of Galileo UK. It connected 49 subscribing international airlines to thousands of travel agents in the UK. It allowed agents and airlines to communicate via a common distribution language and network, handling 97% of UK airline business trade bookings by 1987.
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British Airways eventually bought out the stakes in Travicom held by Videcom and British Caledonian, to become the sole owner. Although Sabre's vice-president in London, David Schwarte, made representations to the U.S. Department of Transportation and the British Monopolies Commission, British Airways defended the use of Travicom as a truly non-discriminatory system in flight selection because an agent had access to some 50 carriers worldwide, including Sabre, for flight information.
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The processing power behind SAGE was supplied by the largest discrete component-based computer ever built, the IBM-manufactured AN/FSQ-7. Each SAGE Direction Center housed an FSQ-7 which occupied an entire floor, approximately 22,000 square feet not including supporting equipment. The FSQ-7 was actually two computers, "A" side and "B" side. Computer processing was switched from "A" side to "B" side on a regular basis, allowing maintenance on the unused side. Information was fed to the DCs from a network of radar stations as well as readiness information from various defense sites. The computers, based on the raw radar data, developed "tracks" for the reported targets, and automatically calculated which defenses were within range. Operators used light guns to select targets on-screen for further information, select one of the available defenses, and issue commands to attack. These commands would then be automatically sent to the defense site via teleprinter.
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Connecting the various sites was an enormous network of telephones, modems and teleprinters. Later additions to the system allowed SAGE's tracking data to be sent directly to CIM-10 Bomarc missiles and some of the US Air Force's interceptor aircraft in-flight, directly updating their autopilots to maintain an intercept course without operator intervention. Each DC also forwarded data to a Combat Center for "supervision of the several sectors within the division" .: 51
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SAGE became operational in the late 1950s and early 1960s at a combined cost of billions of dollars. It was noted that the deployment cost more than the Manhattan Project—which it was, in a way, defending against. Throughout its development, there were continual concerns about its real ability to deal with large attacks, and the Operation Sky Shield tests showed that only about one-fourth of enemy bombers would have been intercepted. Nevertheless, SAGE was the backbone of NORAD's air defense system into the 1980s, by which time the tube-based FSQ-7s were increasingly costly to maintain and completely outdated. Today the same command and control task is carried out by microcomputers, based on the same basic underlying data.
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Just prior to World War II, Royal Air Force tests with the new Chain Home radars had demonstrated that relaying information to the fighter aircraft directly from the radar sites was not feasible. The radars determined the map coordinates of the enemy, but could generally not see the fighters at the same time. This meant the fighters had to be able to determine where to fly to perform an interception but were often unaware of their own exact location and unable to calculate an interception while also flying their aircraft.
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The solution was to send all of the radar information to a central control station where operators collated the reports into single tracks, and then reported these tracks to the airbases, or sectors. The sectors used additional systems to track their own aircraft, plotting both on a single large map. Operators viewing the map could then see what direction their fighters would have to fly to approach their targets and relay that simply by telling them to fly along a certain heading or vector. This Dowding system was the first ground-controlled interception system of large scale, covering the entirety of the UK. It proved enormously successful during the Battle of Britain, and is credited as being a key part of the RAF's success.
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The system was slow, often providing information that was up to five minutes out of date. Against propeller driven bombers flying at perhaps 225 miles per hour this was not a serious concern, but it was clear the system would be of little use against jet-powered bombers flying at perhaps 600 miles per hour . The system was extremely expensive in manpower terms, requiring hundreds of telephone operators, plotters and trackers in addition to the radar operators. This was a serious drain on manpower, making it difficult to expand the network.
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The idea of using a computer to handle the task of taking reports and developing tracks had been explored beginning late in the war. By 1944, analog computers had been installed at the CH stations to automatically convert radar readings into map locations, eliminating two people. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy began experimenting with the Comprehensive Display System , another analog computer that took X and Y locations from a map and automatically generated tracks from repeated inputs. Similar systems began development with the Royal Canadian Navy, DATAR, and the US Navy, the Naval Tactical Data System. A similar system was also specified for the Nike SAM project, specifically referring to a US version of CDS, coordinating the defense over a battle area so that multiple batteries did not fire on a single target. All of these systems were relatively small in geographic scale, generally tracking within a city-sized area.
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When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949, the topic of air defense of the US became important for the first time. A study group, the "Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee" was set up under the direction of Dr. George Valley to consider the problem, and is known to history as the "Valley Committee".
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Their December report noted a key problem in air defense using ground-based radars. A bomber approaching a radar station would detect the signals from the radar long before the reflection off the bomber was strong enough to be detected by the station. The committee suggested that when this occurred, the bomber would descend to low altitude, thereby greatly limiting the radar horizon, allowing the bomber to fly past the station undetected. Although flying at low altitude greatly increased fuel consumption, the team calculated that the bomber would only need to do this for about 10% of its flight, making the fuel penalty acceptable.
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The only solution to this problem was to build a huge number of stations with overlapping coverage. At that point the problem became one of managing the information. Manual plotting was ruled out as too slow, and a computerized solution was the only possibility. To handle this task, the computer would need to be fed information directly, eliminating any manual translation by phone operators, and it would have to be able to analyze that information and automatically develop tracks. A system tasked with defending cities against the predicted future Soviet bomber fleet would have to be dramatically more powerful than the models used in the NTDS or DATAR.
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The Committee then had to consider whether or not such a computer was possible. The Valley Committee was introduced to Jerome Wiesner, associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Wiesner noted that the Servomechanisms Laboratory had already begun development of a machine that might be fast enough. This was the Whirlwind I, originally developed for the Office of Naval Research as a general purpose flight simulator that could simulate any current or future aircraft by changing its software.
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Wiesner introduced the Valley Committee to Whirlwind's project lead, Jay Forrester, who convinced him that Whirlwind was sufficiently capable. In September 1950, an early microwave early-warning radar system at Hanscom Field was connected to Whirlwind using a custom interface developed by Forrester's team. An aircraft was flown past the site, and the system digitized the radar information and successfully sent it to Whirlwind. With this demonstration, the technical concept was proven. Forrester was invited to join the committee.
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With this successful demonstration, Louis Ridenour, chief scientist of the Air Force, wrote a memo stating "It is now apparent that the experimental work necessary to develop, test, and evaluate the systems proposals made by ADSEC will require a substantial amount of laboratory and field effort." Ridenour approached MIT President James Killian with the aim of beginning a development lab similar to the war-era Radiation Laboratory that made enormous progress in radar technology. Killian was initially uninterested, desiring to return the school to its peacetime civilian charter. Ridenour eventually convinced Killian the idea was sound by describing the way the lab would lead to the development of a local electronics industry based on the needs of the lab and the students who would leave the lab to start their own companies. Killian agreed to at least consider the issue, and began Project Charles to consider the size and scope of such a lab.
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Project Charles was placed under the direction of Francis Wheeler Loomis and included 28 scientists, about half of whom were already associated with MIT. Their study ran from February to August 1951, and in their final report they stated that "We endorse the concept of a centralized system as proposed by the Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee, and we agree that the central coordinating apparatus of this system should be a high-speed electronic digital computer." The report went on to describe a new lab that would be used for generic technology development for the Air Force, Army and Navy, and would be known as Project Lincoln.
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Loomis took over direction of Project Lincoln and began planning by following the lead of the earlier RadLab. By September 1951, only months after the Charles report, Project Lincoln had more than 300 employees. By the end of the summer of 1952 this had risen to 1300, and after another year, 1800. The only building suitable for classified work at that point was Building 22, suitable for a few hundred people at most, although some relief was found by moving the non-classified portions of the project, administration and similar, to Building 20. But this was clearly insufficient space. After considering a variety of suitable locations, a site at Laurence G. Hanscom Field was selected, with the groundbreaking taking place in 1951.
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The terms of the National Security Act were formulated during 1947, leading to the creation of the US Air Force out of the former US Army Air Force. During April of the same year, US Air Force staff were identifying specifically the requirement for the creation of automatic equipment for radar-detection which would relay information to an air defence control system, a system which would function without the inclusion of persons for its operation. The December 1949 "Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee" led by Dr. George Valley had recommended computerized networking for "radar stations guarding the northern air approaches to the United States" . After a January 1950 meeting, Valley and Jay Forrester proposed using the Whirlwind I for air defense. On August 18, 1950, when the "1954 Interceptor" requirements were issued, the USAF "noted that manual techniques of aircraft warning and control would impose "intolerable" delays": 484 published Electronic Air Defense Environment for 1954 in December .) During February–August 1951 at the new Lincoln Laboratory, the USAF conducted Project Claude which concluded an improved air defense system was needed.
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In a test for the US military at Bedford, Massachusetts on 20 April 1951, data produced by a radar was transmitted through telephone lines to a computer for the first time, showing the detection of a mock enemy aircraft. This first test was directed by C. Robert Wieser.
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The "Summer Study Group" of scientists in 1952 recommended "computerized air direction centers…to be ready by 1954."
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IBM's "Project High" assisted under their October 1952 Whirlwind subcontract with Lincoln Laboratory,: 210 and a 1952 USAF Project Lincoln "fullscale study" of "a large scale integrated ground control system" resulted in the SAGE approval "first on a trial basis in 1953".: 128 The USAF had decided by April 10, 1953, to cancel the competing ADIS , and the University of Michigan's Aeronautical Research Center withdrew in the spring.: 289 Air Research and Development Command planned to "finalize a production contract for the Lincoln Transition System".: 201 Similarly, the July 22, 1953, report by the Bull Committee identified completing the Mid-Canada Line radars as the top priority and "on a second-priority-basis: the Lincoln automated system"
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The Priority Permanent System with the initial radar stations was completed in 1952: 223 as a "manual air defense system" The Permanent System radar stations included 3 subsequent phases of deployments and by June 30, 1957, had 119 "Fixed CONUS" radars, 29 "Gap-filler low altitude" radars, and 23 control centers". At "the end of 1957, ADC operated 182 radar stations 17 control centers … 32 had been added during the last half of the year as low-altitude, unmanned gap-filler radars. The total consisted of 47 gap-filler stations, 75 Permanent System radars, 39 semimobile radars, 19 Pinetree stations,…1 Lashup -era radar and a single Texas Tower".: 223 "On 31 December 1958, USAF ADC had 187 operational land-based radar stations" .
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Systems scientist Jay Forrester was instrumental in directing the development of the key concept of an interception system during his work at Servomechanisms Laboratory of MIT. The concept of the system, according to the Lincoln Laboratory site was to
"develop a digital computer that could receive vast quantities of data from multiple radars and perform real-time processing to produce targeting information for intercepting aircraft and missiles."
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The AN/FSQ-7 was developed by the Lincoln Laboratory's Digital Computer Laboratory and Division 6, working closely with IBM as the manufacturer. Each FSQ-7 actually consisted of two nearly identical computers operating in "duplex" for redundancy. The design used an improved version of the Whirlwind I magnetic core memory and was an extension of the Whirlwind II computer program, renamed AN/FSQ-7 in 1953 to comply with Air Force nomenclature. It has been suggested the FSQ-7 was based on the IBM 701 but, while the 701 was investigated by MIT engineers, its design was ultimately rejected due to high error rates and generally being "inadequate to the task." IBM's contributions were essential to the success of the FSQ-7, and IBM benefited immensely from its association with the SAGE project, most evidently during development of the IBM 704.
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On October 28, 1953, the Air Force Council recommended 1955 funding for "ADC to convert to the Lincoln automated system": 193 .: 201 The "experimental SAGE subsector, located in Lexington, Mass., was completed in 1955…with a prototype AN/FSQ-7…known as XD-1" . In 1955, Air Force personnel began IBM training at the Kingston, New York, prototype facility, and the "4620th Air Defense Wing was established at Lincoln Laboratory"
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On May 3, 1956, General Partridge presented CINCNORAD's Operational Concept for Control of Air Defense Weapons to the Armed Forces Policy Council, and a June 1956 symposium presentation identified advanced programming methods of SAGE code. For SAGE consulting Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories formed the Air Defense Engineering Service , which was contracted in January 1954. IBM delivered the FSQ-7 computer's prototype in June 1956, and Kingston's XD-2 with dual computers guided a Cape Canaveral BOMARC to a successful aircraft intercept on August 7, 1958.: 197 Initially contracted to RCA, the AN/FSQ-7 production units were started by IBM in 1958 IBM's production contract developed 56 SAGE computers for $.5 billion —cf. the $2 billion WWII Manhattan Project.
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General Operational Requirements 79 and 97 were "the basic USAF documents guiding development and improvement of ground environment.: 97 Prior to fielding the AN/FSQ-7 centrals, the USAF initially deployed "pre-SAGE semiautomatic intercept systems" to Air Defense Direction Centers, ADDCs: 11 . On April 22, 1958, NORAD approved Nike AADCPs to be collocated with the USAF manual ADDCs at Duncanville Air Force Station TX, Olathe Air Force Station KS, Belleville Air Force Station IL, and Osceola Air Force Station KS.
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In 1957, SAGE System groundbreaking at McChord AFB was for DC-12 where the "electronic brain" began arriving in November 1958, and the "first SAGE regional battle post began operating in Syracuse, New York in early 1959".: 263 BOMARC "crew training was activated January 1, 1958", and AT&T "hardened many of its switching centers, putting them in deep underground bunkers", The North American Defense Objectives Plan submitted to Canada in December 1958 scheduled 5 Direction Centers and 1 Combat Center to be complete in Fiscal Year 1959, 12 DCs and 3 CCs complete at the end of FY 60, 19 DC/4 CC FY 61, 25/6 FY 62, and 30/10 FY 63. On June 30 NORAD ordered that "Air Defense Sectors were to be designated as NORAD sectors", : 7
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SAGE Geographic Reorganization: The SAGE Geographic Reorganization Plan of July 25, 1958, by NORAD was "to provide a means for the orderly transition and phasing from the manual to the SAGE system." The plan identified deactivation of the Eastern, Central, and Western Region/Defense Forces on July 1, 1960, and "current manual boundaries" were to be moved to the new "eight SAGE divisions" as soon as possible. Manual divisions "not to get SAGE computers were to be phased out" along with their Manual Air Defense Control Centers at the headquarters base: "9th Geiger Field… 32d, Syracuse AFS… 35th, Dobbins AFB… 58th, Wright-Patterson AFB… 85th, Andrews AFB". The 26th SAGE Division --the 1st of the SAGE divisions—became operational at Hancock Field on 1 January 1959 after the redesignation started for AC&W Squadrons October 1.): 156 Additional sectors included the Los Angeles Air Defense Sector designated in February 1959. A June 23 JCS memorandum approved the new "March 1959 Reorganization Plan" for HQ NORAD/CONAD/ADC.: 5
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Project Wild Goose teams of Air Materiel Command personnel installed c. 1960 the Ground Air Transmit Receive stations for the SAGE TDDL . By the middle of 1960, AMC had determined that about 800,000 man-hours would be required to bring the F-106 fleet to the point where it would be a valuable adjunct to the air defense system. Part of the work was accomplished by Sacramento Air Materiel Area. The remainder was done at ADC bases by roving AMC field assistance teams supported by ADC maintenance personnel. After a September 1959 experimental ATABE test between an "abbreviated" AN/FSQ-7 staged at Fort Banks and the Lexington XD-1, the 1961 "SAGE/Missile Master test program" conducted large-scale field testing of the ATABE "mathematical model" using radar tracks of actual SAC and ADC aircraft flying mock penetrations into defense sectors. Similarly conducted was the joint SAC-NORAD Sky Shield II exercise followed by Sky Shield III on 2 September 1962 On July 15, 1963, ESD's CMC Management Office assumed "responsibilities in connection with BMEWS, Space Track, SAGE, and BUIC." The Chidlaw Building's computerized NORAD/ADC Combined Operations Center in 1963 became the highest echelon of the SAGE computer network when operations moved from Ent AFB's 1954 manual Command Center to the partially underground "war room". Also in 1963, radar stations were renumbered and the vacuum-tube SAGE System was completed .: 9
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On "June 26, 1958,…the New York sector became operational": 207 and on December 1, 1958, the Syracuse sector's DC-03 was operational Construction of CFB North Bay in Canada was started in 1959 for a bunker ~700 feet underground , and by 1963 the system had 3 Combat Centers. The 23 SAGE centers included 1 in Canada, and the "SAGE control centers reached their full 22 site deployments in 1961 ." The completed Minot AFB blockhouse received an AN/FSQ-7, but never received the FSQ-8 .
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The SAGE system included a direction center assigned to air defense sectors as they were defined at the time.
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*Some of the originally planned 32 DCs were never completed and DCs were planned at installations for additional sectors: Calypso/Raleigh NC, England/Shreveport LA, Fort Knox KY, Kirtland/Albuquerque NM, Robins/Miami, Scott/St. Louis, Webb/San Antonio TX.
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The environment allowed radar station personnel to monitor the radar data and systems' status and to use the range height equipment to process height requests from Direction Center personnel. DCs received the Long Range Radar Input from the sector's radar stations, and DC personnel monitored the radar tracks and IFF data provided by the stations, requested height-finder radar data on targets, and monitored the computer's evaluation of which fighter aircraft or Bomarc missile site could reach the threat first. The DC's "NORAD sector commander's operational staff" could designate fighter intercept of a target or, using the Senior Director's keyed console in the Weapons Direction room, launch a Bomarc intercept with automatic Q-7 guidance of the surface-to-air missile to a final homing dive .
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The "NORAD sector direction center air defense artillery director consoles ADA battle staff officer", and the NSDC automatically communicated crosstelling of "SAGE reference track data" to/from adjacent sectors' DCs and to 10 Nike Missile Master AADCPs. Forwardtelling automatically communicated data from multiple DCs to a 3-story Combat Center usually at one of the sector's DCs for coordinating the air battle in the NORAD region and which forwarded data to the NORAD Command Center . NORAD's integration of air warning data along with space surveillance, intelligence, and other data allowed attack assessment of an Air Defense Emergency for alerting the SAC command centers , The Pentagon/Raven Rock NMCC/ANMCC, and the public via CONELRAD radio stations.
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The Burroughs 416L SAGE component was the Cold War network connecting IBM supplied computer system at the various DC and that created the display and control environment for operation of the separate radars and to provide outbound command guidance for ground-controlled interception by air defense aircraft in the "SAGE Defense System" . Burroughs Corporation was a prime contractor for SAGE network interface equipment which included 134 Burroughs AN/FST-2 Coordinate Data Transmitting Sets at radar stations and other sites, the IBM supplied AN/FSQ-7 at 23 Direction Centers, and the AN/FSQ-8 Combat Control Computers at 8 Combat Centers. The 2 computers of each AN/FSQ-7 together weighing 275 short tons-force used about ⅓ of the DC's 2nd floor space and at ~$50 per instruction had approximately 125,000 "computer instructions support actual operational air-defense mission" processing. The AN/FSQ-7 at Luke AFB had additional memory and was used as a "computer center for all other" DCs. Project 416L was the USAF predecessor of NORAD, SAC, and other military organizations' "Big L" computer systems .
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Network communications:
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The SAGE network of computers connected by a "Digital Radar Relay" used AT&T voice lines, microwave towers, switching centers , etc.; and AT&T's "main underground station" was in Kansas with other bunkers in Connecticut , California , Iowa and Maryland . CDTS modems at automated radar stations transmitted range and azimuth, and the Air Movements Identification Service provided air traffic data to the SAGE System. Radar tracks by telephone calls could be entered via consoles of the 4th floor "Manual Inputs" room adjacent to the "Communication Recording-Monitoring and VHF" room. In 1966, SAGE communications were integrated into the AUTOVON Network.
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SAGE Sector Warning Networks provided the radar netting communications for each DC and eventually also allowed transfer of command guidance to autopilots of TDDL-equipped interceptors for vectoring to targets via the Ground to Air Data Link Subsystem and the Ground Air Transmit Receive network of radio sites for "HF/VHF/UHF voice & TDDL" each generally co-located at a CDTS site. SAGE Direction Centers and Combat Centers were also nodes of NORAD's Alert Network Number 1, and SAC Emergency War Order Traffic included "Positive Control/Noah's Ark instructions" through northern NORAD radio sites to confirm or recall SAC bombers if "SAC decided to launch the alert force before receiving an execution order from the JCS".
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A SAGE System ergonomic test at Luke AFB in 1964 "showed conclusively that the wrong timing of human and technical operations was leading to frequent truncation of the flight path tracking system" .: 9 SAGE software development was "grossly underestimated": 370 : "the biggest mistake the SAGE computer program was jump from the 35,000 instructions … to the more than 100,000 instructions on the" AN/FSQ-8. NORAD conducted a Sage/Missile Master Integration/ECM-ECCM Test in 1963, and although SAGE used AMIS input of air traffic information, the 1959 plan developed by the July 1958 USAF Air Defense Systems Integration Division for SAGE Air Traffic Integration was cancelled by the DoD.
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SAGE radar stations, including 78 DEW Line sites in December 1961, provided radar tracks to DCs and had frequency diversity radars United States Navy picket ships also provided radar tracks, and seaward radar coverage was provided. By the late 1960s EC-121 Warning Star aircraft based at Otis AFB MA and McClellan AFB CA provided radar tracks via automatic data link to the SAGE System. Civil Aeronautics Administration radars were at some stations , and the ARSR-1 Air Route Surveillance Radar rotation rate had to be modified "for SAGE Modes III and IV" : 21
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ADC aircraft such as the F-94 Starfire, F-89 Scorpion, F-101B Voodoo, and F-4 Phantom were controlled by SAGE GCI. The F-104 Starfighter was "too small to be equipped with data link equipment" and used voice-commanded GCI,: 229 but the F-106 Delta Dart was equipped for the automated data link . The ADL was designed to allow Interceptors that reached targets to transmit real-time tactical friendly and enemy movements and to determine whether sector defence reinforcement was necessary.
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Familiarization flights allowed SAGE weapons directors to fly on two-seat interceptors to observe GCI operations. Surface-to-air missile installations for CIM-10 Bomarc interceptors were displayed on SAGE consoles.
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Partially solid-state AN/FST-2B and later AN/FYQ-47 computers replaced the AN/FST-2, and sectors without AN/FSQ-7 centrals requiring a "weapon direction control device" for USAF air defense used the solid-state AN/GSG-5 CCCS instead of the AN/GPA-73 recommended by ADC in June 1958. Back-Up Interceptor Control with CCCS dispersed to radar stations for survivability allowed a diminished but functional SAGE capability. In 1962, Burroughs "won the contract to provide a military version of its D825" modular data processing system for BUIC II. BUIC II was first used at North Truro Z-10 in 1966, and the Hamilton AFB BUIC II was installed in the former MCC building when it was converted to a SAGE Combat Center in 1966 . On June 3, 1963, the Direction Centers at Marysville CA, Marquette/K I Sawyer AFB MI, Stewart AFB NY , and Moses Lake WA were planned for closing and at the end of 1969, only 6 CONUS SAGE DCs remained all with the vacuum tube AN/FSQ-7 centrals.: 47 In 1966, NORAD Combined Operations Center operations at Chidlaw transferred to the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center and in December 1963, the DoD approved solid state replacement of Martin AN/FSG-1 centrals: 317 with the AN/GSG-5 and subsequent Hughes AN/TSQ-51. The "416L/M/N Program Office" at Hanscom Field had deployed the BUIC III by 1971 , and the initial BUIC systems were phased out 1974–5. ADC had been renamed Aerospace Defense Command on January 15, 1968, and its general surveillance radar stations transferred to ADTAC in 1979 when the ADC major command was broken up
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For airborne command posts, "as early as 1962 the Air Force began exploring possibilities for an Airborne Warning and Control System ",: 266 and the Strategic Defense Architecture planned an integrated air defense and air traffic control network. The USAF declared full operational capability of the first seven Joint Surveillance System ROCCs on December 23, 1980, with Hughes AN/FYQ-93 systems, and many of the SAGE radar stations became Joint Surveillance System sites The North Bay AN/FSQ-7 was dismantled and sent to Boston's Computer Museum. In 1996, AN/FSQ-7 components were moved to Moffett Federal Airfield for storage and later moved to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The last AN/FSQ-7 centrals were demolished at McChord AFB and Luke AFB . Decommissioned AN/FSQ-7 equipment was also used as science fiction cinema and TV series props .
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SAGE histories include a 1983 special issue of the Annals of the History of Computing, and various personal histories were published, e.g., Valley in 1985 and Jacobs in 1986. In 1998, the SAGE System was identified as 1 of 4 "Monumental Projects", and a SAGE lecture presented the vintage film In Your Defense followed by anecdotal information from Les Earnest, Jim Wong, and Paul Edwards. In 2013, a copy of a 1950s cover girl image programmed for SAGE display was identified as the "earliest known figurative computer art". Company histories identifying employees' roles in SAGE include the 1981 System Builders: The Story of SDC and the 1998 Architects of Information Advantage: The MITRE Corporation Since 1958.
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The contract to build the Mark II was signed with Harvard in February 1945, after the successful demonstration of the Mark I in 1944. It was completed and debugged in 1947, and delivered to the US Navy Proving Ground at Dahlgren, Virginia in March 1948, becoming fully operational by the end of that year.
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The Mark II was constructed with high-speed electromagnetic relays instead of the electro-mechanical counters used in the Mark I, making it much faster than its predecessor. It weighed 25 short tons and occupied over 4,000 square feet of floor space. Its addition time was 0.125 seconds and the multiplication time was 0.750 seconds. This was a factor of 2.6 faster for addition and a factor of 8 faster for multiplication compared to the Mark I. It was the second machine to have floating-point hardware. A unique feature of the Mark II is that it had built-in hardware for several functions such as the reciprocal, square root, logarithm, exponential, and some trigonometric functions. These took between five and twelve seconds to execute. Additionally, the Mark II was actually composed of two sub-computers that could either work in tandem or operate on separate functions, to cross-check results and debug malfunctions.
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The Mark I and Mark II were not stored-program computers – they read instructions of the program one at a time from a tape and executed them. The Mark II had a peculiar programming method that was devised to ensure that the contents of a register were available when needed. The tape containing the program could encode only eight instructions, so what a particular instruction code meant depended on when it was executed. Each second was divided up into several periods, and a coded instruction could mean different things in different periods. An addition could be started in any of eight periods in the second, a multiplication could be started in any of four periods of the second, and a transfer of data could be started in any of twelve periods of the second. Although this system worked, it made the programming complicated, and it reduced the efficiency of the machine somewhat.
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The Mark II is also known for being the computer with the first recorded instance of an actual bug disrupting its operation. The insect was extracted from the machine's electronics and taped to the log book, with the note "first actual case of bug being found", on September 9, 1947.
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There are several methods of classifying exploits. The most common is by how the exploit communicates to the vulnerable software.
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A remote exploit works over a network and exploits the security vulnerability without any prior access to the vulnerable system.
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A local exploit requires prior access to the vulnerable system and usually increases the privileges of the person running the exploit past those granted by the system administrator. Exploits against client applications also exist, usually consisting of modified servers that send an exploit if accessed with a client application. A common form of exploits against client applications are browser exploits.
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Exploits against client applications may also require some interaction with the user and thus may be used in combination with the social engineering method. Another classification is by the action against the vulnerable system; unauthorized data access, arbitrary code execution, and denial of service are examples.
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Many exploits are designed to provide superuser-level access to a computer system. However, it is also possible to use several exploits, first to gain low-level access, then to escalate privileges repeatedly until one reaches the highest administrative level . In this case the attacker is chaining several exploits together to perform one attack, this is known as an exploit chain.
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