This attachment is empty – can you re-send? Many thanks, Marc Marc Weber | marc@webhistory.org | +1 415 282 6868 Internet History Program Founder and Curator, Computer History Museum 1401 N Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 computerhistory.org/nethistory Co-founder, Web History Center and Project, webhistory.org On Mar 23, 2014, at 5:23 AM, Paul N. Edwards wrote:
SIGCISers and SIGCISters -
Courtesy of Prof. Willard McCarty, who dug this out with a FOIA request and some help from an archivist and others at Lincoln Labs, here is the 1950 final report of the Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee (ADSEC) — classified until now. Many of you will know that this committee, aka the Valley Committee (for its leader, MIT prof George Valley), played a major role in initiating the SAGE air defense system of the 1950s.
It’s a fascinating read for the organism/machine metaphors, the cybernetic thinking, and the view of what was seen as possible (and not possible). To me, one of the most interesting thing about it is the awareness that converting analog signals into digital form was even more of a stumbling block than computing itself, which is seen as a relatively trivial matter that would require mainly time to develop computers with enough capacity to track hundreds or thousands of airplanes at once.
Best,
Paul
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Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010)
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<ADSEC, Final Report 24 October 1950.pdf>
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Marc Weber | marc@webhistory.org | +1 415 282 6868 Internet History Program Founder and Curator, Computer History Museum 1401 N Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 computerhistory.org/nethistory Co-founder, Web History Center and Project, webhistory.org