When the computers would malfunction, you'd take pictures of those main consoles to diagnose the conditions.'Īccording to Tipton, the program that displayed the pin-up image was a diagnostic that tested data flow between the two SAGE computers on site (referred to as the A and B computers). 'We used the Polaroid cameras to take pictures of anomaly conditions. 'One day I decided to take pictures for posterity's sake,' recalls Tipton, 'And those two Polaroids are the only ones that made it out of the building.' The other Polaroid is a self-portrait of Tipton himself sitting in front of the AN/FSQ-7's Duplex Maintenance Console. She reclines awkwardly, her legs splayed apart in an uncomfortable but provocative pose that smacks of mid-century pin-up art. The photo shows the tube of an SD console displaying the outline of woman with her arms held high, cradling her head while emphasizing her bosom. Tipton snapped the only known photo of this pin-up program in action at Ft. In early 1959, 21-year-old Airman First Class Lawrence A. In doing so, the pin-up's programmer created the world's earliest known figurative computer art, and quite possibly the first image of a human being on a computer screen. Using a console and one of the two SAGE computers, an enterprising programmer created a graphical interpretation of a pin-up style woman that rendered as line segments on the SD's 19-inch screen. Instead, it drew lines from any point to any other point arbitrarily, sort of like an electronic Etch-a-Sketch.Ī SAGE operator at a Situation Display Console, holding a light gun (IBM)Īmong this very serious business of detecting incoming nuclear threats, someone decided to commandeer the AN/FSQ-7's computing power and graphical display for something a little more fun. One may be familiar with CRTs from their use in television sets, but unlike a television set, the CRT in a situation display console did not paint a top-to-bottom raster-based image on the screen. area.Įach situation display console in the blockhouse contained a specially crafted 19-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) display that could draw vector-based lines or alphanumeric characters on any portion of the screen. Lee Air Force Station in Virginia was responsible for monitoring a sector which included the Washington, D.C. That way, even in an era of unreliable vacuum tubes (of which each computer contained 50,000), SAGE could maintain near 100 percent uptime.Īt the top story of every blockhouse lay dozens of OA-1008/FSQ situation display consoles (91 in a typical installation), each hooked to the active AN/FSQ-7 computer, upon which personnel would monitor different segments of airspace in a given defense sector. Each computer cost the equivalent of $1.89 billion in today's dollars and occupied half an acre of floor space.Ĭomputer frames of the AN/FSQ-7 Computer System, 1958 (MITRE)Īt any given time of the day, technicians at each SAGE center kept one of the dual AN/FSQ-7 computers live while the other underwent maintenance. At the heart of each center lay an enormous, 4-story windowless blockhouse that contained two massive AN/FSQ-7 computers. Starting in 1958, the Air Force built 21 SAGE centers around the continental U.S. If something looked out of place, SAGE commanders could scramble jets to intercept the unknown object. The SAGE system defended against Soviet attack by combining live radar input with pre-programmed commercial airline flight information to paint a live picture of what should or shouldn't be flying in American airspace. It was a project so ambitious that it ranks among the massive scientific programs like the Manhattan Project and Apollo in scope and budget, yet surprisingly few people know about it today. At the time, the threat of nuclear strike came primarily from Soviet bombers penetrating American airspace, so the Air Force, in conjunction with MIT and IBM, created SAGE: Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. In the early years of the Cold War, the United States invested billions of dollars into a state-of-the-art computerized air defense system unlike any the world had ever seen.

Pin up girl