COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 15

TRAINING THE AIR DEFENSE COMMAND
RAND Corporation received a contract to train the people who manned the Air Defense System. This project had gotten its start in a fascinating manner. People at RAND had wanted to study the interface/reaction between a man and a machine. At first, an IBM Room with the machines and the operators, provided the best environment they could imagine. Boards had to be wired, cards had to be punched, then fed into this machine and that, a human worked with the results of one operation, then had to follow the next procedural step, and on and on from one person and machine to another, to produce the final product.

As the next stage of this study, they analyzed the interface/reaction between the operators of Air Defense RADAR screens, and the Air Defense System. When they had completed that analysis, it was discovered that the men who had been exposed to the RAND experiment, were the best trained men in the Air Defense system, so RAND received a contract to train the rest of them. (It probably wasn’t all that simple.)

At first, training maps were plotted by a human, then cards were punched with data that when read into an IBM 407 Tabulator, would result in multiple copies of a printed page with a RADAR screen background, with airplane identifications and locations printed a little further along their flight path, then were shown on the previous map. Those maps were read, pages were advanced, a script was followed, as the rather crude training system proceeded.

A story is told (about two-thirds of the way down in the essay by my friend Fred Gruenberger) that IBM was very surprised that RAND wanted to buy paper feeding devices, usually part of a printer, so they could feed the paper maps from page to page, for training purposes (Search for the word carriages in that story). Slow beyond imagination, and not easily applied to a wide variety of RADAR site locations, with a wide variety of flight patterns.