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1,101
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 lead...
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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 empha...
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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 M...
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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...
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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, a...
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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 ...
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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 strength...
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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...
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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...
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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-ta...
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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. Stra...
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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 Spec...
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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 th...
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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 parti...
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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 bo...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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 coul...
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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 ...
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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 alg...
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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 Det...
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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 crea...
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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 a...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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 attack...
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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 me...
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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 ...
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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 syste...
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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 experim...
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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 Co...
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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 de...
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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 in...
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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 enou...
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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 ...
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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 MI...
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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 Defens...
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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 sui...
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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 re...
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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,...
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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". ...
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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 d...
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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 memo...
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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...
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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 t...
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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,...
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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 switc...
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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 "curren...
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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 defens...
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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,...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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/...
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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 ...
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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 C...
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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 designe...
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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 CCC...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 wa...
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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 ...
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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 app...
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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 toge...