ABSTRACT
By 1956, what had started in 1951 with a half-dozen people working in the System Research Laboratory at RAND had become a project of over a thousand people working on system training and SAGE throughout the country (Baum, 1982, p. 26). This project, formally labeled the System Development Division, involved more people than in the rest of RAND combined. Largely because of this sudden growth, the decision was made to separate the Division from RAND; the result was a new nonprofit corporation, the System Development Corporation (SDC), with one dominant Air Force client, the Air Defense Command, and two dominant activities, systems training and programming for SAGE.
