System Technology ~ 1957 System Development Corporation; SAGE Software Development

more at http://quickfound.net/

'On the development of an early warning aircraft simulation system... Excellent footage of computers and data processing... Mainframe computers, credit cards, information technology, aerial of System Development Corporation headquarters, engineers at work, drafting diagrams and maps, engineers in meetings, women draftspersons, electronic typewriters, women office workers, in-basket, keypunch stations, tabulating cards (IBM cards) being punched, card sorters, magnetic tape libraries, mag tape drives, computer operators, film recorders, early computer graphics, paper tape punches, wiring computer frames, computer printers, printouts moving by camera, women technicians..'

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Development_Corporation

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

System Development Corporation (SDC) was a computer software company based in Santa Monica, California. Founded in 1955, it is considered the first company of its kind...

History

SDC began as the systems engineering group for the SAGE air-defense system at the RAND Corporation. RAND spun off the group in 1957 as a non-profit organization that provided expertise for the United States military in the design, integration, and testing of large, complex, computer-controlled systems. SDC became a for-profit corporation in 1969, and began to offer its services to all organizations rather than only to the American military.

Ownership

In 1980, SDC was sold by its board of directors to the Burroughs Corporation.

In 1986, Burroughs merged with the Sperry Corporation to form Unisys, and SDC was folded into Unisys Defense Systems.

In 1991, Unisys Defense Systems was renamed Paramax, a wholly owned subsidiary of Unisys, so that it could be spun off to reduce Unisys debt.

In 1995, Unisys sold Paramax to the Loral Corporation, although a small portion of it, containing some projects that had originated in SDC, remained with Unisys.

In 1996, Loral sold Paramax to Lockheed Martin. In 1997, the Paramax business unit was separated from Lockheed Martin under the control of Frank Lanza (who had been Loral's President and CEO); it is now a subsidiary of L-3 Communications.

Software projects

In the 1960s, SDC developed the timesharing system for the AN/FSQ-32 (Q32) mainframe computer for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Q-32 was one of the first systems to support both multiple users and inter-computer communications. Experiments with a dedicated modem connection to the TX-2 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led to computer communication applications such as e-mail. In the 1960s, SDC also developed the JOVIAL programming language and the Time-Shared Data Management System (TDMS), an Inverted File Database System. Both were commonly used in real-time military systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment

The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was a system of large computers and associated networking equipment that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area. SAGE directed and controlled the NORAD response to a Soviet air attack, operating in this role from the late 1950s into the 1980s. Its enormous computers and huge displays remain a part of cold war lore, and a common prop in movies such as Dr. Strangelove and Colossus.

The processing power behind SAGE was supplied by the largest computer ever built, the AN/FSQ-7...