ABSTRACT
When yoked to its giant peripherals-microwave radars from the bright boys at the AFCRL , the network-within-a-building that was Whirlwind would plump out into a network-within-a-region, and later, swell into a network-within-a-continent. By any measure, it was a mind-boggling expansion, especially given the fragile state of digital electronics in the early 1950s. From a single Whirlwind behemoth, 48 advanced replicas of the 55,000-vacuum tube, 32-bit computer were cloned (redesignated in military nomenclature as the AN/FSQ-7 ). Two each were housed in 23 fourstory concrete bastions (plus one more duplex set some 700 feet underground at North Bay, Canada), each 150’ by 150’ square with 6’ thick walls and covering 130,000 feet of fl oor space, each with its own equally gigantic power and cooling systems, each consuming a white-hot three megawatts
of electricity, and each sprinkled strategically all over the country; enough to provide air defense coverage for both the United States and Canada.4 Linked together by dedicated telephone lines, eerily lit blue rooms of glowing monitor screens tracked everything moving in the sky, fi elded calls from 8,000 Ground Observer Corps outposts; and monitored search radars aboard Navy picket ships, on airborne Warning Star radar aircraft , and on oil rig-type ocean platforms called Texas Towers. Across Canada, three continent-wide belts of radar installations at 49, 55, and 70 degrees north latitude-the northern most being the famous 63-station Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line from western Alaska eastward across Canada to Greenland-fed radar data into the SAGE system. In all, over 181 manned and unmanned radar sites, each with either AN/FPS-19 L-band search radar or AN/FPS-124 Doppler radars for low-fl ying targets, chirped aircraft sightings southward into the giant AN/FSQ-7 computers for processing.
