It is a movie staple to see an overworked air traffic controller sweating over a radar display. Depending on the movie, they might realize they’ve picked the wrong week to stop some bad habit. But how does the system really work? [J. B. Crawford] has a meticulously detailed post about the origins of the computerized air traffic control system (building on an earlier post which is also interesting).
Like many early computer systems, the FAA started out with the Air Force SAGE defense system. It makes sense. SAGE had to identify and track radar targets. The 1959 SATIN (SAGE Air Traffic Integration) program was the result. Meanwhile, different parts of the air traffic system were installing computers piecemeal.
SAGE and its successors had many parents: MIT, MITRE, RAND, and IBM. When it was time to put together a single national air traffic system the FAA went straight to IBM, who glued together a handful of System 360 computers to form the IBM 9020. The computers had a common memory bus and formed redundant sets of computer elements to process the tremendous amount of data fed to the system. The shared memory devices were practically computers in their own right. Each main computing element had a private area of memory but could also allocate in the large shared pool.
The 9200 ran the skies for quite a while until IBM replaced it with the IBM 3083. The software was mostly the same, as were the display units. But the computer hardware, unsurprisingly, received many updates.
If you’re thinking that there’s no need to read the original post now that you’ve got the highlights from us, we’d urge you to click the link anyway. The post has a tremendous amount of detail and research. We’ve only scratched the surface.
There were earlier control systems, some with groovy light pens. These days, the control tower might be in the cloud.
Between the 1980s and 2008, the UK air traffic control radar was routed through a PDP-11/34 (basically a simplified 11/40).
The 11/34 is now installed at the computing museum at Bletchley. It’s kind of neat because for a bit my grandfather maintained the radar at WD whilst they had that machine.
IIRC the UK also aquired the Ex-FAA IBM 9200 for the larger ATC system around 2010/2011? I don’t know what’s in use now.
We’ve even still got nuclear power plants controlled by Ferranti Argus systems in the UK!
Semi Automatic Ground Environment.
Back when rt 128 was America’s Technology Highway!
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue
Start sniffing stroopwafels instead. :)
Surely you can’t be serious
Stop calling me shirley
I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.
“SATIN (SAGE Air Traffic Integration)”
The FAA sure likes acronyms inside acronyms. My favorite is VOR, which stands for VHF Omnidirectional Range.
It’s a DVOR – Doppler is the bit you are missing.
My favorite pun is TLA, which stands for Three Letter Acronym.
And when you run out of letters you go to ETLAs, Extended Three Letter Acronyms!
_G_NU is _N_ot _U_nix
What wanders me is if they got the _NU part and then searched for something to fit.
What if they tried “MegaElectronic” …
Think Tandems would be a nice addition.