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66 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2022 and Air Force, Army, and Navy guided missiles (Figure 2). (I actually grew up in Alsea, Oregon not far from Camp Adair, a SAGE command center, where I once got to tour the blockhouse. is sta- tion was in operation until the late 1960s—the middle of my college years in Corvallis.) Many of the missiles along the Canadian bor- der (like the BOMARC) had nuclear-tipped warheads that could explode over Canada. Fortunately, they were never used, although one accidentally blew up in New Jersey and contaminated the area with plutonium 3 . ese were the first supersonic missiles. By 1949, the rockets could reach altitudes of 100,000 to 150,000 feet and had the capability of flying at Mach 6.9 4 . To be effective, the SAGE system would have to direct interceptors and missiles to their target until their own radar acquired the targets. Smaller missiles were coordinated for city defenses (Nike Ajax/Nike Zeuz) and used conventional warheads. Construction was completed in 1962. SAGE Hardware To get the project underway, it was decided to use the experimental technology of an MIT-built computer, an IBM-Whirlwind II, the most powerful of its time. Each direction center housed a dual-redundant AN/FSQ-7 computer that consisted of over 500,000 lines of code and executed over 25,000 instructions, by far the largest computer programs ever written at that time 2 . e computers and per- sonnel were all housed in a windowless con- crete blockhouse (Figures 3 and 4a). e all- tube computer had an impressive set of com- ponents and characteristics 6 : Figure 2: These districts would command and control the radars and defense elements of interceptor fighters and guided missiles. 5