When I was a kid I went on a tour of a SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) AN/FSQ-7 ... an amazing piece of the cold war. It was enormously impressive - filled with huge numbers of power eating tubes.
A few interesting pages exist on the net ... two of the best are by Ed Thelen...
For interesting stories and commentary...
http://ed-thelen.org/sage-1.html
while amazingly rich detail can be found in the introduction manual
http://ed-thelen.org/SageIntro.html
Some of the details are
- dual processor with one online, the other as a hot backup
- extensive intersite communication it saw the first use of modems over phone lines
- hot pluggable modules
- 32 bit machine ... left half was op code, right halp address
- perhaps the first large scale use of core memory (6 microsecond) .. 64 K 32 bit words
- external memory drums with 150K words each
- each processor ad 58.000 vacuum tubes
- one megawatt per processor
- more than one megawatt of cooling per processor
- huge amounts of power required for AC
- developed by MIT (its roots were the Whirlwind), build by IBM, installed nad "networked" by AT&T
- 23 sites were deployed at a cost of many $billions. The last site was operational until 1984
Was the huge expense worth the effort? That probably depends on who is asking the question. Did it advance computing? Did it meet the requirements of the task? Was the task meaningful? There was a lot of money to counter the Soviet Union in that era.
7:12:11 AM 
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