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Cape Cod System
The Cape Cod System was a computer system designed to simulate an air defense system covering southern New England. It was named after Cape Cod, the location of many of the radars. History The Cape Cod System was designed to demonstrate a computerized air defense system, covering southern New England. Signals from three long range (AN/FPS-3) radars, eleven gap-filler radars, and three height-finding radars were converted from analog to digital format and transmitted over telephone lines to the Whirlwind I computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first tests of the Cape Cod System, beginning in September 1953, used only simulated data, but later tests used U.S. Air Force B-47 Stratojet bombers, as stand-ins for Soviet bombers, and real interceptors scrambled from four Air Force bases. The Cape Cod System verified that the new core-based machine was fast enough for use in SAGE, and an industrial effort was started in order to mass-produce the AN/FSQ-7 computers for this role. RCA wa ...
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Air Defense
Anti-aircraft warfare (AAW) is the counter to aerial warfare and includes "all measures designed to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of hostile air action".AAP-6 It encompasses surface-based, subsurface (Submarine#Armament, submarine-launched), and air-based weapon systems, in addition to associated sensor systems, command and control arrangements, and passive measures (e.g. barrage balloons). It may be used to protect naval, army, ground, and air forces in any location. However, for most countries, the main effort has tended to be homeland defense. Missile defense, Missile defense is an extension of air defence, as are initiatives to adapt air defence to the task of intercepting any projectile in flight. Most modern anti-aircraft (AA) weapons systems are optimized for short-, medium-, or long-range air defence, although some systems may incorporate multiple weapons (such as both autocannons and surface-to-air missiles). 'Layered air defence' usually refers to multiple 't ...
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New England
New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick to the northeast and Quebec to the north. The Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Ocean are to the east and southeast, and Long Island Sound is to the southwest. Boston is New England's largest city and the capital of Massachusetts. Greater Boston, comprising the Boston–Worcester–Providence Combined Statistical Area, houses more than half of New England's population; this area includes Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England; Manchester, New Hampshire, the largest city in New Hampshire; and Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of and largest city in Rhode Island. In 1620, the Pilgrims (Plymouth Colony), Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony, the second successful settlement in Briti ...
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Cape Cod
Cape Cod is a peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean from the southeastern corner of Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. Its historic, maritime character and ample beaches attract heavy tourism during the summer months. The name Cape Cod, coined in 1602 by Bartholomew Gosnold, is the ninth-oldest English place-name in the U.S. As defined by the Cape Cod Commission's enabling legislation, Cape Cod is coextensive with Barnstable County, Massachusetts. It extends from Provincetown, Massachusetts, Provincetown in the northeast to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Woods Hole in the southwest, and is bordered by Plymouth, Massachusetts, Plymouth to the northwest. The Cape is divided into fifteen New England town, towns, several of which are in turn made up of multiple named villages. Cape Cod forms the southern boundary of the Gulf of Maine, which extends north-eastward to Nova Scotia. Since 1914, most of Cape Cod has been separated from the mainland by the Cape Cod Cana ...
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Telephone Line
A telephone line or telephone circuit (or just line or circuit industrywide) is a single-user circuit on a telephone communication system. It is designed to reproduce speech of a quality that is understandable. It is the physical wire or other signaling medium connecting the user's telephone apparatus to the telecommunications network, and usually also implies a single telephone number for billing purposes reserved for that user. Telephone lines are used to deliver consistent landline telephone service and digital subscriber line (DSL) phone cable service to the premises. Telephone overhead lines are connected to the public switched telephone network. The voltage at a subscriber's network interface is typically 48 V between the ring and tip wires, with tip near ground and ring at –48 V. In the United States In 1878, the Bell Telephone Company began using two-wire circuits, called the local loop, from each user's telephone to end offices, which performed a ...
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Whirlwind (computer)
Whirlwind I was a Cold War-era List of vacuum-tube computers, vacuum-tube computer developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the United States Navy, 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 Bit-level parallelism, bit-parallel (rather than serial computer, bit-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 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, 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 United States Navy, U.S. Navy's Naval Research Lab app ...
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Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the most populous city in the county, the List of municipalities in Massachusetts, fourth-largest in Massachusetts behind Boston, Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester, and Springfield, Massachusetts, Springfield, and List of cities in New England by population, ninth-most populous in New England. The city was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, which was an important center of the Puritans, Puritan theology that was embraced by the town's founders. Harvard University, an Ivy League university founded in Cambridge in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lesley University, and Hult Inte ...
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B-47 Stratojet
The Boeing B-47 Stratojet (Boeing company designation Model 450) is a retired American long- range, six-engined, turbojet-powered strategic bomber designed to fly at high subsonic speed and at high altitude to avoid enemy interceptor aircraft. The primary mission of the B-47 was as a nuclear bomber capable of striking targets within the Soviet Union. Development of the B-47 can be traced back to a requirement expressed by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) in 1943 for a reconnaissance bomber that harnessed newly-developed jet propulsion. Another key innovation adopted during the development process was the swept wing, drawing upon captured German research. With its engines carried in nacelles underneath the wing, the B-47 represented a major innovation in post–World War II combat jet design, and contributed to the development of modern jet airliners. In April 1946, the USAAF ordered two prototypes, designated "XB-47. On 17 December 1947, the first prototype perfor ...
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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 AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central, AN/FSQ-7, manufactured by IBM. Each SAGE Direction Center (DC) housed an FSQ-7 which occupied an entire floor, approximately not including supporting equipment. T ...
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AN/FSQ-7
The AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central, referred to as the Q7 for short, was a computerized air defense command and control system. It was used by the United States Air Force for ground-controlled interception as part of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment network during the Cold War. In accordance with the Joint Electronics Type Designation System (JETDS), the "''AN/FSQ-7''" designation represents the 7th design of an Army-Navy electronic device for fixed special combination system. The JETDS system also now is used to name all Department of Defense electronic systems. 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 Short ton, 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 fo ...
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International Business Machines
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries; for 29 consecutive years, from 1993 to 2021, it held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business. IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of Tabulating machine, punch-card tabulating systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe, exemplified by the IBM System/360, System/360 and its successors, wa ...
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North American Aerospace Defense Command
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD ; , CDAAN), known until March 1981 as the North American Air Defense Command, is a Combined operations, combined organization of the United States and Canada that provides aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and protection for Canada and the continental United States. Headquarters for NORAD and the NORAD/United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) center are located at Peterson Space Force Base in El Paso County, Colorado, El Paso County, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The nearby Cheyenne Mountain Complex has the Alternate Command Center. The Commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD commander and deputy commander are, respectively, a General (United States), United States four-star general or equivalent and a Lieutenant-general (Canada), Canadian lieutenant-general or equivalent. Command NORAD is headed by its Commander of NORAD, commander, who is a Four-star rank, four-star General (United States), ...
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