One of the most significant technological artifacts of the period documented in the film is the SAGE, the Semi Automatic Ground Environment, that was created by the DOD to detect possible and expected hostile attacks on the homeland by (principally) Soviet armed forces. There is a notable propaganda film in the the Internet Archive from the Prelinger Collection that is something of a period piece (it is blatant propaganda) produced by IBM. There have been many accounts of the SAGE that have been written over the last few decades, one of my favorite stories about the technology comes from the wonderful book Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust by Donald MacKenzie. I quote at length here:
On October 5, 1960, the president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., and two other business leaders were being shown round the North American Air Defense headquarters at Colorado Springs. They were in the war room, where officers sat at their desks facing huge plastic display boards depicting Eurasia and North America. Above the map of Eurasia was an alarm level indicator directly connected to the radars and computer system of the missile early warning station at Thule, Greenland.
One of the visitors later recalled that "we were told that if No 1 flashed, it meant only routine objects in the air. If two flashed, it meant there were a few more unidentified objects, but nothing suspicious. And so on. If five flashed, it was highly probable that objects in the air were moving toward America. In other words an attack was likely." As they watched the numbers started to rise. When they reached "4" senior officers started to run into the room. As "5" flashed the visitors were hustled out of the war room into an office. They could do nothing but wait...
The BMEWS had picked up multiple launchings of ballistic missiles from inside Siberia. This information was relayed to U.S. and Canadian officers aboard the C-118 airborne command post that served as the nerve center for the defense system in case of nuclear attack. After several tense moments where puzzled officers in Colorado Springs tried to understand the reasons for the seemingly dire information that was being presented by the system:
Alarm level 5 meant 99.9 percent certainty that a ballistic missile attack had been launched. If that were true ellipses should be forming on the war room's display map of North America and should start to shrink, indicating the targets of the attack. Yet no ellipses were forming, and the "minutes to go" indicator showed nothing.
After conversations with intelligence officials it was determined that Khruschev was in New York attending the general assembly meeting of the U.N. and that it would be very unlikely that the Soviets would launch a ballistic missile attack under these circumstances.
Later that day, those involved gradually pieced together what had happened. What the radars in Greenland had detected was the moon rising over Norway. Apparently, no one involved in BMEW's development had realized that its powerful radars, designed to detect objects up to 3,000 miles distant, would receive echoes from one almost a quarter of a million miles away. The BMEWS system software, designed to track fast-rising missiles, was thoroughly foiled by the slow rising, far-distant, moon. As radar echoes bounced back again and again, the BMEWS software interpreted them as sightings of multiple objects, not multiple sightings of the same object, and the consequent impression of a massive, continually growing missile attack was reinforced by the reflections from the moon of the radar beam's sidelobes...
The SAGE system was created as a technological response to the growing realization in the postwar world that humans were not capable of making timely decisions that weighed geopolitical and military strategies, political intentions, and actions while using all available information, particularly given the speed and destructive capacity of new weapons conceived in defense laboratories on both sides.
By 1961 all the sites [of the SAGE system] were declared "operationally ready," but even in the late 1960s the operators in some SAGE installations were to be found using "makeshift plastic overlays on the cathode-ray displays" and "the 'scope watchers were bypassing the elaborate electronics operating more or less in the same manual mode used in World War II." Robert Everett, wo headed the division of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory responsible for the overall system design and testing of SAGE summed up the experience, "When we all began to work on SAGE we believed our own myths about software - that one can do anything with software on a general-purpose computer; that software is easy to write, test, and maintain; that it is easily replicated, doesn't wear out, and is not subject to transient errors. We had a lot to learn."
(quoted from MacKenzie, Donald. 2001. Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust. MIT Press)
