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MIT Lincoln Laboratory
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as rapid system prototyping and demonstration. Its core competencies are in sensors, integrated sensing, signal processing for information extraction, decision-making support, and communications. These efforts are aligned within ten mission areas. The laboratory also maintains several field sites around the world. The laboratory transfers much of its advanced technology to government agencies, industry, and academia, and has launched more than 100 start-ups. History Origins At the urging of the United States Air Force, the Lincoln Laboratory was created in 1951 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of an effort to improve the U.S. air defense syste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexington, Massachusetts
Lexington is a suburban town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is 10 miles (16 km) from Downtown Boston. The population was 34,454 as of the 2020 census. The area was originally inhabited by Native Americans, and was first settled by Europeans in 1641 as a farming community. Lexington is well known as the site of the first shots of the American Revolutionary War, in the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775, where the " Shot heard 'round the world" took place. It is home to Minute Man National Historical Park. History Indigenous history Native Americans inhabited the area that would become Lexington for thousands of years prior to European colonization of the Americas, as attested by a woodland era archaeological site near Loring Hill south of the town center. At the time of European contact, the area may have been a border region between Naumkeag or Pawtucket to the northeast, Massachusett to the south, and Nipmuc to the west, though the land was ev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lincoln, Massachusetts
Lincoln is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. The population was 7,014 according to the 2020 United States Census, including residents of Hanscom Air Force Base that live within town limits. The town, located in the MetroWest region of Boston's suburbs, has a rich colonial history and large amounts of public conservation land. History Lincoln was settled by Europeans in 1654, as a part of Concord. The majority of Lincoln was formed by splitting off a substantial piece of southeast Concord and incorporated as a separate town in 1754. Due to their "difficulties and inconveniences by reason of their distance from the places of Public Worship in their respective Towns," local inhabitants petitioned the General Court to be set apart as a separate town. Because the new town was composed of parts "nipped" off from the adjacent towns of Concord, Weston (which itself had been part of Watertown) and Lexington (which itself had been part of Cambridge), it was sometimes referre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Command And Control
Command and control (abbr. C2) is a "set of organizational and technical attributes and processes ... hatemploys human, physical, and information resources to solve problems and accomplish missions" to achieve the goals of an organization or enterprise, according to a 2015 definition by military scientists Marius Vassiliou, David S. Alberts, and Jonathan R. Agre. The term often refers to a military system. Versions of the United States Army ''Field Manual 3-0'' circulated circa 1999 define C2 in a military organization as the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commanding officer over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of a mission. A 1988 NATO definition is that command and control is the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated individual over assigned resources in the accomplishment of a common goal. An Australian Defence Force definition, similar to that of NATO, emphasises that C2 is the system empowering des ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central
The AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central, referred to as the Q7 for short, was a computerized command and control system for Cold War ground-controlled interception used in the USAF Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense network. The name “AN/FSQ” derives from ''Army-Navy / Fixed Special eQuipment''. An advancement of the pioneering MIT Whirlwind II digital computer design, and manufactured by IBM as prime contractor, the AN/FSQ-7 was the largest discrete computer system ever built. Each of the 24 installed machines weighed 250 tons. The AN/FSQ-7 used a total of 60,000 vacuum tubes (49,000 in the computers) and up to 3 megawatts of electricity, performing about 75,000 instructions per second for networking regional radars. Primary functions Installations in the USAF Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense network were configured as duplex systems, using a pair of AN/FSQ-7 computers to provide fault tolerance. One was active at any time, the other on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TX-0
The TX-0, for ''Transistorized Experimental computer zero'', but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64 K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Construction of the TX-0 began in 1955 and ended in 1956.Highlights from ''The Computer Museum Report'' Volume 8 Spring 1984 The Computer Museum, Boston, MA, archived at ed-thelen.org, retrieved 2010-2-19 It was used continually through the 1960s at . The TX-0 incorpo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnetic-core Memory
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random access, random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic material (usually a Ferrite (magnet)#Semi-hard ferrites, semi-hard ferrite) as transformer cores, where each wire threaded through the core serves as a transformer winding. Two or more wires pass through each core. Magnetic Magnetic hysteresis, hysteresis allows each of the cores to "remember", or store a state. Each core stores one bit of information. A core can be magnetized in either the clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. The value of the bit stored in a core is zero or one according to the direction of that core's magnetization. Electric current pulses in some of the wires through a core allow the direction of the magnetization in that core to be set in either direction, thus storing a one or a zero. Another wire ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jay Wright Forrester
Jay Wright Forrester (July 14, 1918 – November 16, 2016) was a pioneering American computer engineer and systems scientist. He is credited with being one of the inventors of magnetic core memory, the predominant form of random-access computer memory during the most explosive years of digital computer development (between 1955 and 1975). It was part of a family of related technologies which bridged the gap between vacuum tubes and semiconductors by exploiting the magnetic properties of materials to perform switching and amplification. He is also believed to have created the first animation in the history of computer graphics, a "jumping ball" on an oscilloscope. Later, he was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he introduced the Forrester effect describing fluctuations in supply chains, and is credited as the founder of system dynamics, which deals with the simulation of interactions between objects in dynamic systems and is most often applied to researc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Whirlwind I
Whirlwind I was a Cold War-era vacuum tube computer developed by the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the U.S. Navy. Operational in 1951, it was among the first digital electronic computers that operated in real-time for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems. It was one of the first computers to calculate in parallel (rather than serial), and was the first to use magnetic-core memory. Its development led directly to the Whirlwind II design used as the basis for the United States Air Force SAGE air defense system, and indirectly to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960s, particularly because of the mantra "short word length, speed, people." Background During World War II, the U.S. Navy's Naval Research Lab approached MIT about the possibility of creating a computer to drive a flight simulator for training bomber crews. They envisioned a fairly simple system in which the computer would continually ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as Computer program, programs. These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. A computer system is a nominally complete computer that includes the Computer hardware, hardware, operating system (main software), and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation. This term may also refer to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster. A broad range of Programmable logic controller, industrial and Consumer electronics, consumer products use computers as control systems. Simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls are included, as are factory devices like industrial robots and computer-aided design, as well as general-purpose devi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radar
Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. A radar system consists of a transmitter producing electromagnetic waves in the radio or microwaves domain, a transmitting antenna, a receiving antenna (often the same antenna is used for transmitting and receiving) and a receiver and processor to determine properties of the objects. Radio waves (pulsed or continuous) from the transmitter reflect off the objects and return to the receiver, giving information about the objects' locations and speeds. Radar was developed secretly for military use by several countries in the period before and during World War II. A key development was the cavity magnetron in the United Kingdom, which allowed the creation of relatively small systems with sub-meter resolution. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment
The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was a system of mainframe computer, large computers and associated computer network, networking equipment that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area. SAGE directed and controlled the NORAD response to a possible Soviet air attack, operating in this role from the late 1950s into the 1980s. Its enormous computers and huge displays remain a part of cold war lore, and after decommissioning were common props in movies such as ''Dr. Strangelove'' and Colossus: The Forbin Project, ''Colossus'', and on science fiction TV series such as ''The Time Tunnel''. The processing power behind SAGE was supplied by the largest discrete component-based computer ever built, the IBM-manufactured AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central, AN/FSQ-7. Each SAGE Direction Center (DC) housed an FSQ-7 which occupied an entire floor, approximately not including supporting equipment. The F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aircraft
An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air. It counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines. Common examples of aircraft include airplanes, helicopters, airships (including blimps), gliders, paramotors, and hot air balloons. The human activity that surrounds aircraft is called ''aviation''. The science of aviation, including designing and building aircraft, is called '' aeronautics.'' Crewed aircraft are flown by an onboard pilot, but unmanned aerial vehicles may be remotely controlled or self-controlled by onboard computers. Aircraft may be classified by different criteria, such as lift type, aircraft propulsion, usage and others. History Flying model craft and stories of manned flight go back many centuries; however, the first manned ascent — and safe descent — in modern times took place by larger hot-air ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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