System Development Corporation

~ the obituary ~

In april 1955 the United States government asked the RAND Corporation to help write the software for SAGE, a continental air defense system that would link radar stations to computers and route interceptors automatically. Nobody had written software at that size before. Within a few months RAND's new System Development Division had five hundred people on it, and within a year up to a thousand. In october 1956 RAND spun the whole thing off as an independent non-profit called System Development Corporation.

The work was SAGE and a training program to go with it, written for the IBM AN/FSQ-7, a duplexed machine built out of vacuum tubes that filled its own building. There was one Q-7 installed at SDC's complex on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, and the story that the building needed half the air conditioning then used in the entire city was told as a joke and was apparently close to the truth. Around three thousand people worked at that site.

What SDC actually produced, more than any single system, was people. It hired programmers before there was a degree for the job and trained them on the largest computing project in the world, and then it watched them leave for everywhere else, which is why it kept getting described as a university for programmers. In late 1961 one of its departments became the software integration contractor for the Air Force Satellite Control Network and held that role for the next thirty years. It became a for-profit corporation in 1969 and started selling to customers who were not the military.

I am a computer engineer, which is a job description somebody had to invent, and a good deal of it was invented in this building by people who had been hired out of mathematics or out of nothing at all. Nothing about SDC reached me directly. What reached me was its output: systems engineering as a named discipline, and the assumption that software controlling something dangerous gets reviewed by people who did not write it. Both of those are downstream of a contract signed in april 1955, and i have worked inside those habits for years without once wondering where they came from.

~ the case file ~

~ what it taught ~

Two of SDC's side products outlived everything else it did. One was JOVIAL, a programming language whose name stands for Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language, after Jules Schwartz, who worked there. JOVIAL went into real-time military systems and was still flying decades later in aircraft nobody had retired yet. The other was the Time-Shared Data Management System, an inverted-file database that predates most of what people mean when they say database.

The more interesting machine was the AN/FSQ-32. SDC built a timesharing system for it in the 1960s under an ARPA contract, and the Q-32 was one of the first computers to support both multiple simultaneous users and communication with another computer. There was a dedicated modem link between it and the TX-2 at MIT, and applications that ran over that link included early electronic mail. That is several years before the ARPANET existed, on a machine built for air defense research, in Santa Monica.

~ what it became ~

In 1981 the board sold SDC to the Burroughs Corporation, which wanted its systems engineering capability and had worked alongside it during SAGE. In 1986 Burroughs merged with Sperry to form Unisys and SDC was folded into Unisys Defense Systems, which is the point at which the name stopped being used for anything.

After that it is just a chain of custody. Unisys Defense Systems was renamed Paramax in 1991 so it could be spun off against Unisys debt, sold to Loral in 1995, sold on to Lockheed Martin in 1996, separated out again in 1997 under Frank Lanza and made a subsidiary of L-3 Communications, and merged into L3Harris in 2019. Somewhere inside a defense contractor with a hyphenated name there are project files whose earliest pages were typed in Santa Monica in 1956.

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