COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 18

SAGE, SEMI AUTOMATIC GROUND ENVIRONMENT
Along with several other people, I was sent to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass. to learn about a system so secret even my boss didn’t know what was going on, what I was going to work on, or why I was going to Boston. The boss said, “Here, you are supposed to read this Colliers Magazine. One of the stories tells a little about what you are going to be working on.”

When this was first written a few years ago, mentioning Colliers got me thinking, so we checked and found that the City Library in Riverside, CA, had bound copies of Colliers for those years. Well, we now have a Xerox copy of that article, and it does tell a lot that we were told was still very, very secret, at that time.

When RAND received the contract to install the SAGE Air Defense System, a study showed there were only a few hundred people in the world who knew what a computer program was, and we needed a thousand of them. What we didn’t know, was that we needed several thousand of them. How do you hire people for a job no one knows anything about? I helped create and validate what I was told was the first Aptitude Test for computer programmers. That is among the reasons that I know that many of the best programmers are not only nuts, you wouldn’t trust them go to the store, by themselves, for a quart of milk.