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70 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2022 IBM, not counting spares. But availability was 99.97%. 7 The Operating System e soware was written by the RAND Corporation with the help of IBM and Sys- tem Development Corp. (SDC). e 250,000 lines of code, at the peak, employed 20% of the world's programmers. e one million words of code were written in assembly language and JOVIEL. Forty-four manuals of schematics and specifications, including S/W coding, are available from IBM 8 . The Final Outcome By 1983, the system was finally shut down as ICBMs made it obsolete. Over the hori- zon, radars like the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) and orbiting satellites were replacing it. It was not completely disman- tled as many of the radars were upgraded and a newer SAGEII computer from Hughes was available to use the soware; it was turned over to the FAA for domestic flight control. e success of the system came at an enor- mous cost. While neither IBM nor the gov- ernment have ever released production costs on the secretive (and now decommis- sioned) project, civilian estimates put the total development cost at $8–$12 billion ($65– $97 billion when adjusted for inflation). is would be three times the cost of the Manhat- tan Project. While source opinions vary on the effective- ness of this project, John F. Jacobs, associate head of Lincoln's Division 6, stated: "One of the outstanding things… was the esprit de corps—the spirit that pervaded the operation. Everyone had a sense of purpose—a sense of doing something important. People felt the pressure and had the desire to solve the air defense prob- lem, although there was oen disagreement as to how to achieve that end. Energy was directed more toward solving individual problems, such as making a workable high-speed memory or a useable data link, than it was toward solving the problem of the value of the finished product. It was an engineer's dream." 9 What I found was that the system pioneered many firsts: • Real-time computer architectures • Core memory • Magnetic drum memory • Networking of sensors, computers, autonomous elements, and humans • Simple CRT operator interfaces—light pen Figure 6: No circuit boards; a close-up view of two of 7,000 tube circuit modules, all hand-wired. 5