Designing these kinds of systems in the 50s and 60s must have been one of the all-time peak engineering experiences. Nearly everything on paper and drafting film, stacks of databooks, nomograms, slide rules, electromechanics everywhere, stratospheric budgets, hand wiring, manually machined parts and just generally making up and discovering things, from machining to physics, as you go along that we now consider fundamentals.
While deep diving into the history of how digital computers evolved from the initial ENIAC era of the late 1940s to the IBM 360 and DEC PDPs of the early 60s, I was surprised by just how much fundamental 1950s tech engineering was driven by the massive effort (and budgets) to create the technology needed to enable the national air defense network NORAD would later manage.
While a lot of the basic research existed on paper, turning that into functional 24/7 systems at mega-scale was an almost unimaginable engineering challenge. The fragments which already existed were little more than one-off prototype computers like ENIAC, none of which were remotely close to big enough, fast enough or reliable enough. So they were faced with creating pretty much the full stack from transistors to storage to networking to displays - all of which had to be several generations bigger, faster and better than anything that had ever been shown to even sort-of work on a lab bench. While the budgets were huge, the requirements were equally insane and there was huge pressure to deliver it ASAP. And "it" had to actually work and then be built, deployed and operated daily across dozens of locations. It ultimately involved dozens of huge companies, hundreds of sub-contractor firms and tens of thousands of people. Pretty much everything I'd ever heard about in 1960s computing, when I dug into where the fundamental tech came from, ended up tracing back to enabling something the air defense network needed in the 50s.
I came away realizing the mid-60s scalable commercial computing industry I think of as my ancestral 'up-line' in computing, the 360/PDP systems which led to the 1970s 8-bit microprocessors which led to the 80s home computers anyone could own, would have all been at least a decade later without the crazy mad dash in the 1950s to enable the air defense build-out.
He got his start because he had a security clearance and knew how to install and repair ccd camera systems do he did so for rocky flats and Cheyenne mountain. Then they asked him to build a box that had a film video camera that would take images of a crt display for record keeping. This was before it was possible digitally. So he did, he made 2. Then they needed a lift to bring down the Hughes projectors they used in Cheyenne mountain, the old kind with 3 color crt projectors. It needed to drop down the projector so they could change it out in less time than it took a nuke to come from Russia, so he did. He founded a company to keep making them, they still make them to this day.
So many companies were set up on the back of this cutting edge stuff, as well as Mercury and Apollo, satellites, nuclear reactors, submarines, jet liners, the SR-71, the Heavy Presses, it just goes on and on. Everything from one guy in a barn up to huge corporate labs. Obviously the war already boosted a lot of stuff, but the Atomic Age atmosphere must have felt like an unstoppable industrial whirlwind.
Even though the recent AI hype has been pretty feverish, it doesn't seem like we have had the same kind of top-to-bottom hopeful dynamism.
I got to go inside Cheyenne Mountain Complex back in 1988 when I was the project engineer for the DSP satellite ground network upgrade. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any control room. In fact, I didn't get to see much at all. When we got there we were informed that the problem had already been resolved, so we just turned around and left.
But I did get to go down the tunnel and through the blast door.
It's sort of a random collection of images. The first image isn't the command center at all.
It's network operations, which is obvious if you look closely.
For a few years after the downfall of the USSR and before 9/11, there were public tours. That was a happy, peaceful time.
Here's a partial tour from the 1970s.[1]
There is no one big control room. There are about a half dozen control rooms
with different functions. There are duplicate control rooms outside the mountain, and for a few years, those were primary and the mountain only had a skeleton staff. Not any more.
(Although Hegseth apparently wants to move some operations to Huntsville, Alabama.)
Modern photos are available. Modest sized rooms with flat screens on the walls, desks, ordinary monitors, and keyboards. About the only unusual thing is that there's video switching, so that monitors can be copied to a big screen, or someone else's screen, when something is happening and many people need to focus on one screen.
There's now a vast flood of crap AI art and mislabeled clickbait for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Sorting out the real from the fake is becoming harder.
(One of my career achievements from my aerospace days was managing to avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.)
Seemed weird to me that they turned it into a secondary site; we were fighting relatively incapable-of-force-projection people in the mountains and deserts at the time, but even if Russia wasn't a clear threat in 2008, it seems like it should have been obvious EMP, conventional infiltration attacks, etc. would be reasonable threats in the future. Unless you're willing to go to fully dispersed command (and thus risk a commander at theater or below level launching on his own authority...), or run 24x7 airborne looking glass (which ended in 1990, and presumably was even more costly than modernizing Cheyenne Mountain Complex), what we had from 2008-2015 was clearly less survivable.
On the photos everyone looks busy, but I presume that the guys spent 30 years sitting in front of screens where nothing happen, except perhaps once every 3 months.
They had simulations, although I don’t know how often they were run. There was at least one incident where a simulation was accidentally fed into the system and people came uncomfortably close to retaliating.
I'm guessing some OCR was used to generate this by the many "typos" throughout.
Comparing these images of the COC to what was reimagined for War Games really feels underwhelming. From the few images, it just feels very complex and overloaded with information that is just a lot to take in. Maybe it gets easier to deal with when that's what you do everyday, but it definitely has that feel of "designed by an engineer" instead of "designed by a UI professional". Essentially, it feels like every single UI I've ever made.
My college roommate was stationed there from about 1997 to 2001 and I was lucky enough to get a tour as a civilian. They took us into the VIP room that overlooks the room shown in most of the pictures and then they ran through an exercise. In the modern era, the displays were much more focused. There were a set of large projection displays along the wall. In the center of the room, the personnel each had a workstation with more focused information for their specific task.
I got to tour it in the early 2000s. It was even less impressive to look at then than what these pictures show, and many of the rooms were rebuilt to be even smaller. One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president were supposed to decide the fate of the world in a crisis was so cramped as to resemble that one scene from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but with nicer furniture. It was also amusing to me that with all secret operations shut down (to accommodate plebs like me), the skeleton crew left to run the place were almost entirely Canadian.
> One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president
I don't think the President would have gone to Cheyenne wouldn't have been time since Colorado is quite far from Washinton D.C - iirc the plan was always kneecap (NEACP[1]) once it was online (and it still is).
Also, a large number of warheads would have been targeted at the mountain. No need to take the risk of having the commander-in-chief in that location. He'd be better off aboard NEACP to be sure. The risk of being shot down by enemy fighters would not be very high. It's hard to be shot down by an incoming MIRV. Even though Colorado is far from DC, I'd imagine they'd head west away from population centers to ride it out.
I suspect they'd go north (from DC or nearby) via a dog leg to the east, once you clear where the Canadians live (which is mostly bunched up on the border) there isn't much up there the Russians or Chinese would want to vaporise and they can dip south to refuel (assuming anything is left to take off to refuel).
Of all of the Clancy-esque fictional warfare I've consumed, I've never read anything about what these scenarios would be like. I'd imagine an armada of planes (or whatever you call the equivalent for planes) would be available as support to NEACP. Not just fighters for defense but fuel tanker support, possibly AWACs in case ground stations are taken out as well. But where they'd actually fly is an interesting question. They could go out over the Atlantic and turn south and be away from targets faster than flying over land. Of course, that's assuming they know where any hostile fleets would be to avoid. Lot's of options though, which is the point of being airborne instead of stuck in a bunker
Those types of books are where I learnt about kneecap back in the late 80s/early 90s as a kid, which is why I didn’t know it had been renamed post Cold War.
They obviously don’t discuss it for obvious reasons but given the options I’d say east then either north or south, Canada is nearer and air fields with sufficient length to be able to land (and is in NATO) which is why it’d be my guess at least to start with, loiter over an unpopulated area and at least the likelihood is reduced of been near a detonation is reduced, the continental US simply has too many targets, though with modern warheads been lower yield they’d likely be OK orbiting unpopulated areas out west I guess.
House of Dynamite on Netflix is a realistic (at least it feels realistic) look at the modern day equivalent. It’s fundamentally an exciting film but I also enjoyed learning how large scale human/technical systems operate during a nuclear crisis.
I have to wonder what part of me has become jaded to the point that the movie did not feel that intense to me. I won't go into details on why I think this movie isn't intense, but it's too new to spoil anything for those yet to see it.
It's not the same as something like Threads (1984) to me.
This is easily the best, inadvertent advertisement ever for boosting the nation's missile defense capabilities, and it's ironic that it came out of progressive Netflix studios, given that progressives have insisted since the 80s that missile defense is a worthless, impossible ("like hitting a bullet with a bullet") MIC boondoggle. Thanks, Netflix!
Designing these kinds of systems in the 50s and 60s must have been one of the all-time peak engineering experiences. Nearly everything on paper and drafting film, stacks of databooks, nomograms, slide rules, electromechanics everywhere, stratospheric budgets, hand wiring, manually machined parts and just generally making up and discovering things, from machining to physics, as you go along that we now consider fundamentals.
While deep diving into the history of how digital computers evolved from the initial ENIAC era of the late 1940s to the IBM 360 and DEC PDPs of the early 60s, I was surprised by just how much fundamental 1950s tech engineering was driven by the massive effort (and budgets) to create the technology needed to enable the national air defense network NORAD would later manage.
While a lot of the basic research existed on paper, turning that into functional 24/7 systems at mega-scale was an almost unimaginable engineering challenge. The fragments which already existed were little more than one-off prototype computers like ENIAC, none of which were remotely close to big enough, fast enough or reliable enough. So they were faced with creating pretty much the full stack from transistors to storage to networking to displays - all of which had to be several generations bigger, faster and better than anything that had ever been shown to even sort-of work on a lab bench. While the budgets were huge, the requirements were equally insane and there was huge pressure to deliver it ASAP. And "it" had to actually work and then be built, deployed and operated daily across dozens of locations. It ultimately involved dozens of huge companies, hundreds of sub-contractor firms and tens of thousands of people. Pretty much everything I'd ever heard about in 1960s computing, when I dug into where the fundamental tech came from, ended up tracing back to enabling something the air defense network needed in the 50s.
I came away realizing the mid-60s scalable commercial computing industry I think of as my ancestral 'up-line' in computing, the 360/PDP systems which led to the 1970s 8-bit microprocessors which led to the 80s home computers anyone could own, would have all been at least a decade later without the crazy mad dash in the 1950s to enable the air defense build-out.
To put a name on it, i believe you are talking about SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
https://sage.mitre.org/ (see also links at the end)
SAGE also pioneered user interface technology, for example:
The first pointing device: https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=727
The first naked lady on a computer: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-n...
And bits of the machinery went on to a long and varied career in film and TV: https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.php?c=73
I used to work for a guy who did.
He got his start because he had a security clearance and knew how to install and repair ccd camera systems do he did so for rocky flats and Cheyenne mountain. Then they asked him to build a box that had a film video camera that would take images of a crt display for record keeping. This was before it was possible digitally. So he did, he made 2. Then they needed a lift to bring down the Hughes projectors they used in Cheyenne mountain, the old kind with 3 color crt projectors. It needed to drop down the projector so they could change it out in less time than it took a nuke to come from Russia, so he did. He founded a company to keep making them, they still make them to this day.
> He founded a company to keep making them
So many companies were set up on the back of this cutting edge stuff, as well as Mercury and Apollo, satellites, nuclear reactors, submarines, jet liners, the SR-71, the Heavy Presses, it just goes on and on. Everything from one guy in a barn up to huge corporate labs. Obviously the war already boosted a lot of stuff, but the Atomic Age atmosphere must have felt like an unstoppable industrial whirlwind.
Even though the recent AI hype has been pretty feverish, it doesn't seem like we have had the same kind of top-to-bottom hopeful dynamism.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/a-history-of-the-ami...
Even in the 70s/80s, some prototypes were hardwired.
"Unauthorized incoming traveler. Unauthorized incoming traveler."
"Closing the iris."
There will never be another SG-1
Cheyenne Mountain Complex and Stargate are inseparably connected in my mind.
I got to go inside Cheyenne Mountain Complex back in 1988 when I was the project engineer for the DSP satellite ground network upgrade. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any control room. In fact, I didn't get to see much at all. When we got there we were informed that the problem had already been resolved, so we just turned around and left.
But I did get to go down the tunnel and through the blast door.
It's sort of a random collection of images. The first image isn't the command center at all. It's network operations, which is obvious if you look closely.
For a few years after the downfall of the USSR and before 9/11, there were public tours. That was a happy, peaceful time.
Here's a partial tour from the 1970s.[1]
There is no one big control room. There are about a half dozen control rooms with different functions. There are duplicate control rooms outside the mountain, and for a few years, those were primary and the mountain only had a skeleton staff. Not any more. (Although Hegseth apparently wants to move some operations to Huntsville, Alabama.)
Modern photos are available. Modest sized rooms with flat screens on the walls, desks, ordinary monitors, and keyboards. About the only unusual thing is that there's video switching, so that monitors can be copied to a big screen, or someone else's screen, when something is happening and many people need to focus on one screen.
There's now a vast flood of crap AI art and mislabeled clickbait for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Sorting out the real from the fake is becoming harder.
(One of my career achievements from my aerospace days was managing to avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd1yLwzQGO8
> avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.
Well, all the cool kids were apparently doing "Deep space radar telemetry" :)
Seemed weird to me that they turned it into a secondary site; we were fighting relatively incapable-of-force-projection people in the mountains and deserts at the time, but even if Russia wasn't a clear threat in 2008, it seems like it should have been obvious EMP, conventional infiltration attacks, etc. would be reasonable threats in the future. Unless you're willing to go to fully dispersed command (and thus risk a commander at theater or below level launching on his own authority...), or run 24x7 airborne looking glass (which ended in 1990, and presumably was even more costly than modernizing Cheyenne Mountain Complex), what we had from 2008-2015 was clearly less survivable.
> Unless you're willing to go to fully dispersed command (and thus risk a commander at theater or below level launching on his own authority...),
pretty much the plot of Dr Strangelove
On the photos everyone looks busy, but I presume that the guys spent 30 years sitting in front of screens where nothing happen, except perhaps once every 3 months.
They had simulations, although I don’t know how often they were run. There was at least one incident where a simulation was accidentally fed into the system and people came uncomfortably close to retaliating.
It's a good thing the simulation learned that the only winning move is not to play.
“WE’RE NOT BEING ATTACKED!! IT’S A SIMULATION!!”
I'm guessing some OCR was used to generate this by the many "typos" throughout.
Comparing these images of the COC to what was reimagined for War Games really feels underwhelming. From the few images, it just feels very complex and overloaded with information that is just a lot to take in. Maybe it gets easier to deal with when that's what you do everyday, but it definitely has that feel of "designed by an engineer" instead of "designed by a UI professional". Essentially, it feels like every single UI I've ever made.
My college roommate was stationed there from about 1997 to 2001 and I was lucky enough to get a tour as a civilian. They took us into the VIP room that overlooks the room shown in most of the pictures and then they ran through an exercise. In the modern era, the displays were much more focused. There were a set of large projection displays along the wall. In the center of the room, the personnel each had a workstation with more focused information for their specific task.
Attractive to look at and information dense for an expert are two very different things that I think modern UI design has forgotten about.
Everything is simplified down to a stupid hamburger menu if you want to do anything off the happy path.
I got to tour it in the early 2000s. It was even less impressive to look at then than what these pictures show, and many of the rooms were rebuilt to be even smaller. One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president were supposed to decide the fate of the world in a crisis was so cramped as to resemble that one scene from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but with nicer furniture. It was also amusing to me that with all secret operations shut down (to accommodate plebs like me), the skeleton crew left to run the place were almost entirely Canadian.
> One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president
I don't think the President would have gone to Cheyenne wouldn't have been time since Colorado is quite far from Washinton D.C - iirc the plan was always kneecap (NEACP[1]) once it was online (and it still is).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-4
Also, a large number of warheads would have been targeted at the mountain. No need to take the risk of having the commander-in-chief in that location. He'd be better off aboard NEACP to be sure. The risk of being shot down by enemy fighters would not be very high. It's hard to be shot down by an incoming MIRV. Even though Colorado is far from DC, I'd imagine they'd head west away from population centers to ride it out.
I suspect they'd go north (from DC or nearby) via a dog leg to the east, once you clear where the Canadians live (which is mostly bunched up on the border) there isn't much up there the Russians or Chinese would want to vaporise and they can dip south to refuel (assuming anything is left to take off to refuel).
Of all of the Clancy-esque fictional warfare I've consumed, I've never read anything about what these scenarios would be like. I'd imagine an armada of planes (or whatever you call the equivalent for planes) would be available as support to NEACP. Not just fighters for defense but fuel tanker support, possibly AWACs in case ground stations are taken out as well. But where they'd actually fly is an interesting question. They could go out over the Atlantic and turn south and be away from targets faster than flying over land. Of course, that's assuming they know where any hostile fleets would be to avoid. Lot's of options though, which is the point of being airborne instead of stuck in a bunker
Those types of books are where I learnt about kneecap back in the late 80s/early 90s as a kid, which is why I didn’t know it had been renamed post Cold War.
They obviously don’t discuss it for obvious reasons but given the options I’d say east then either north or south, Canada is nearer and air fields with sufficient length to be able to land (and is in NATO) which is why it’d be my guess at least to start with, loiter over an unpopulated area and at least the likelihood is reduced of been near a detonation is reduced, the continental US simply has too many targets, though with modern warheads been lower yield they’d likely be OK orbiting unpopulated areas out west I guess.
> Also, a large number of warheads would have been targeted at the mountain.
Yeah, the Loonies in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" keep pounding away at it with space rocks launched from the Moon. It worked in the end, overall.
There were no UI professionals in 1966
Yet a lot of the UIs of that era were rather more intuitive than those today.
Show us the stargate!
Trivia:
Two real US Air Force Chief's of Staff appeared on Stargate SG-1 as themselves -
Generals Michael E. Ryan and John P. Jumper.
I hope the P in John's name stands for Puddle
Phillip
Show us the Santa tracking device! ...it's probably an ADS-B receiver.
I can recommend watching the excellent movie War Games, quite entertaining and still relevant. NORAD plays an important role in it.
WarGames (1983). Don't watch the wrong one.
House of Dynamite on Netflix is a realistic (at least it feels realistic) look at the modern day equivalent. It’s fundamentally an exciting film but I also enjoyed learning how large scale human/technical systems operate during a nuclear crisis.
I have to wonder what part of me has become jaded to the point that the movie did not feel that intense to me. I won't go into details on why I think this movie isn't intense, but it's too new to spoil anything for those yet to see it.
It's not the same as something like Threads (1984) to me.
> House of Dynamite
This is easily the best, inadvertent advertisement ever for boosting the nation's missile defense capabilities, and it's ironic that it came out of progressive Netflix studios, given that progressives have insisted since the 80s that missile defense is a worthless, impossible ("like hitting a bullet with a bullet") MIC boondoggle. Thanks, Netflix!
Similar to Site R on the PA / Maryland border https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex
This is where the last location in Terminator 3 is based on, right? (Great ending.)
F-29 Retaliator also has a "digitized picture" (more like artist's rendering) of the base, but the state seems to be off (Wyoming instead of Colorado): https://www.mobygames.com/game/6233/f29-retaliator/screensho...