SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment)

The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was an automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft used by NORAD from the late 1950s into the 1980s. In later versions, the system could automatically direct aircraft to an interception by sending instructions directly to the aircraft's autopilot.

[@Doh1962]

Intercepts with Nike Hercules usually involved two missiles spaced out to prevent the second missile getting destroyed by the first but close enough to improve the capability of a kill even using nuclear warheads. First intercepts would have involved the long range Bomarc missiles with a 200+ mile range armed with nuclear warheads followed by F-89, 101, 102, or 106 interceptor aircraft armed with Genie nuclear rockets, and finally with Nike Hercules as the close in last resort. Also there would have been multiple interceptors launched and the attack would have probably been much larger on the Soviets part. Probably a mixture of Bison and Bear bombers. Well thought out and put together!

[@bcfbasil]

Cool animation! I was Maintenance man on the SAGE computer. The largest (in physical size) computer ever built. By today's standards my cell phone has more power. The Q7 had two memories. "Little Memory" was 10k and "Big Memory" was a whopping 256k. The memory was "ferrite core" - basically little magnetic doughnuts that could be magnetized it two ways to represent either a 0 or 1. The buffer storage was "magnetic drums" precursor of today's hard drives, but with far less capacity.

[@asmallguy6124]

yeah sage computer despite being the size of a building, it was comparable to an affordable laptop nowadays lmao

[@basilbcf]

​@@asmallguy6124 Even the cheapest laptop today is 1000 x more powerful. The memory on the SAGE computer was only 256k (that's Kilobytes, not Megabytes or Gigabytes ). So the RAM was 1 fourth of one Meg. The cheapest laptop you can get comes with at least 4GB of RAM - that's ridiculously more than 256k. It's amazing the SAGE computer could do what it did with such small amount of memory. But somehow it did a great job for what it was designed to do.

[@razzking]

Thanks for posting this! I appreciate your work creating it. I used to work in the SAGE system when I was in the USAF. Brought back memories of an earlier life

[@dagspicer8094]

Beautifully done!

[@tomasandaur1]

Very nice video!

[@ivandenisovichshukhov]

This could do without the music, but it has the information that I seek.

[@gonzovideo]

This is the first Internet use case!
SAGE -> ARPANET -> Internet

[@pizzza3]

nice presentation.

[@strikeryachts]

They saw UFO's also.

[@highway234]

coulda used this on 911, but apparently we didn't have it on that day.
love this video, and the music that accompanies it. powerful stuff, my friend.

[@stevemoren286]

Very well done indeed. Too bad that we would have only about twenty minutes to live and all of this would have been destroyed by ICBM s and Sub-launched nukes. The enemy would make sure that SAGE was first to go. I was a member of the 23rd NORAD Region combat crew back in the early '70's and was an anti-jamming techn, pretty fun stuff!

[@sbreheny]

He gave the date as "early 1960s" which was before the Soviets really had operational ICBMs (they had 4 operational in 1961) and they may have had a few more short-range SLBMs, it still was far from enough to destroy a significant amount of the US. In the early 1960s, the threat was still largely from strategic bombers.

[@gonzovideo]

And after SAGE, to avoid single points of failure they invented ARPANET.