MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts
Out on the edge of Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington sits a sprawling government research campus that most Americans have never heard of, even though its work may have prevented nuclear war and gave birth to the modern computer age. This is MIT Lincoln Laboratory, established in nineteen fifty-one at the height of Cold War anxiety.
The Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb in nineteen forty-nine. American war planners realized that Soviet long-range bombers could now reach United States cities, and that the country had virtually no warning system to detect them. Congress turned to MIT, which had pioneered radar research during World War Two at its Radiation Laboratory in Cambridge. A new national security lab was established here in Lexington, fourteen miles from the main campus, on land belonging to the Army Air Forces.
Lincoln Laboratory's first major project was SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a nationwide air defense network unlike anything previously attempted. The system linked hundreds of radar stations across North America to a chain of massive computer centers, each housing the AN/FSQ-Seven, manufactured by IBM and the largest discrete computer system ever built. A single machine weighed two hundred and fifty tons and occupied half an acre of floor space. Operators used light guns to identify targets on radar screens and vector interceptor aircraft to meet them.
SAGE was fully operational by nineteen sixty-three. By then, the principal Soviet threat had shifted from bombers to ballistic missiles, which SAGE could not stop. Critics called it an expensive monument to the wrong war. But the engineering breakthroughs it required, real-time computing, digital networking, data links between machines hundreds of miles apart, became early building blocks for later networked computing.
Lincoln Laboratory still operates today, classified and unclassified research alike, working on problems from missile defense to satellite communications to cybersecurity. Most of what happens behind those fences remains quiet.
