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Korean War began in June 1950, IBM won a government contract to develop a “defense calculator.”
    IBM’s most important military contract of the 1950s was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program. The ancestry of the SAGE project can be traced to a memo written by Jay Forrester in 1948, outlining a computerized national air-defense system inspired by radar defenses in World War II for North American defenses against Soviet bomber (and later missile) attacks. Forrester had been working since 1944 at MIT on Project Whirlwind, a digital air-combat-information program. When IBM received a contract to work on SAGE, it received the Whirlwind technology. In addition to IBM, contractors on the SAGE project included MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories, Western Electric, the SDC branch of RAND, and the Burroughs Company. The Computer System Division of Lincoln Laboratories in 1958 became the MITRE Corporation, which worked on software and systems integration.
    When complete, the SAGE system consisted of twenty-three concrete bunkers in the United States and one in Canada. Each of the direction centers contained an IBM AN/FSQ-7 computer, along with a standby. Each AN/FSQ-7 weighed 250 tons, and contained forty-nine thousand vacuum tubes. The installations were designed for the simultaneous analysis of vast amounts of data coming in from radar on the ground and mounted on ships and planes.
    The most ambitious computer project in history to date, the SAGE system was completed in 1963 and remained operational until it was decommissioned in 1983. Although it was technologically obsolete almost as soon as it was finished, the system helped to inspire later innovations. The linkages between the nodes in the SAGE system helped to inspire J. C. Licklider’s musings, which in turn led to the development of ARPANET and the Internet.
    For its part, IBM drew on its experience in the SAGE project in the early 1960s when it received a contract from American Airlines to devise a computerized airline reservation system entitled SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment—even the name was modeled on SAGE). SABRE became the basis of modern airline reservations.
    THE COMPUTER THAT IBM MADE, THAT MADE IBM
    But it was in civilian office computing that IBM would make its greatest mark. Earlier in 1947, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly had incorporated the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to make the UNIVAC and other computers. Their commercial difficulties led the two to visit Watson and his son and eventual successor as head of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr. Perhaps remembering his earlier brush with antitrust law at NCR, the senior Watson had checked with IBM’s lawyers and told the inventors that the Justice Department probably would not allow IBM to absorb their company because of antitrust considerations. Instead, the rights to UNIVAC were sold to James Rand, the president of Remington Rand, making the company a leading computer manufacturer. (In 1955, Remington Rand merged with the Sperry Corporation to become Rand, later Sperry; a merger between Sperry and Burroughs in 1986 produced Unisys.) On live television on election eve 1952, a UNIVAC computer correctly predicted a landslide for Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower (the computer’s operators thought at first the computer must have been mistaken).
    Motivated by competition with Remington Rand, IBM in 1953 brought out its inexpensive model 650, which used magnetic tape instead of punched cards. Thomas Watson Jr. observed that “the 650 became computing’s ‘Model T.’ ” 27
    In the early 1960s, IBM took on the challenge of providing office computers that used compatible software. In secrecy, the company sponsored one of the greatest corporate research programs in history, code-named the New Product Line. Thousands of programmers and engineers labored urgently in multiple laboratories and IBM began to manufacture more semiconductors than any other company in