Gen. Bernard Schriever dies

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...6-22-shriever-
death_x.htm

Jim Davis

Jim Davis wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...6-22-shriever-
death_x.htm

Gen. Schriever built the U.S. missile deterrent
and, simultaneously, laid the foundation for U.S.
space exploration both military and civil.

- Ed Kyle

Rand Simberg wrote:

On 22 Jun 2005 19:38:17 -0700, in a place far, far away, "Ed Kyle"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:

Jim Davis wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...6-22-shriever-
death_x.htm

Gen. Schriever built the U.S. missile deterrent
and, simultaneously, laid the foundation for U.S.
space exploration both military and civil.

He was the Billy Mitchell of space.

He was better than that. He got the job done, and didn't get his ass
canned for shooting his mouth off out of turn.
Gen, Schreiver was the only live human being to have an Air Force Base
named for him. (Well, until now, anyway)

--
Pete Stickney
Java Man knew nothing about coffee.

On 22 Jun 2005 19:38:17 -0700, in a place far, far away, "Ed Kyle"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

Jim Davis wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...6-22-shriever-
death_x.htm

Gen. Schriever built the U.S. missile deterrent
and, simultaneously, laid the foundation for U.S.
space exploration both military and civil.

He was the Billy Mitchell of space.

Peter Stickney wrote:
Rand Simberg wrote:

On 22 Jun 2005 19:38:17 -0700, in a place far, far away, "Ed Kyle"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:

Jim Davis wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...6-22-shriever-
death_x.htm

Gen. Schriever built the U.S. missile deterrent
and, simultaneously, laid the foundation for U.S.
space exploration both military and civil.

He was the Billy Mitchell of space.

He was better than that. He got the job done, and didn't get his ass
canned for shooting his mouth off out of turn.
Gen, Schreiver was the only live human being to have an Air Force Base
named for him. (Well, until now, anyway)

He can be compared with Gen. Curtis Lemay and
Admiral Rickover - in terms of his accomplishments
if not his personality. Gen. Lemay built the
modern U.S. Air Force and the Strategic Air Command
(the Air Force still flies some of his B-52s).
Adm. Rickover built the nuclear navy with its
stealthly missile boats. Gen. Schriever built the
land based missile force - the third leg of the
nuclear triad. Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman
missiles, including the manufacture, support, test,
and underground silo launch infrastructure.

Gen. Schriever was the man who won the "missile
race"

- Ed Kyle

Ed Kyle wrote:


He can be compared with Gen. Curtis Lemay and
Admiral Rickover - in terms of his accomplishments
if not his personality. Gen. Lemay built the
modern U.S. Air Force and the Strategic Air Command
(the Air Force still flies some of his B-52s).
Adm. Rickover built the nuclear navy with its
stealthly missile boats. Gen. Schriever built the
land based missile force - the third leg of the
nuclear triad. Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman
missiles, including the manufacture, support, test,
and underground silo launch infrastructure.

Gen. Schriever was the man who won the "missile
race"

There's a lot to be said for that. But don't leave out Admiral
Hopper. She was a major player in getting those electronical
thinkums to do useful work. I'd hate to be in a command bunker
somewhere trying to calculate an incoming missile's impact point by
hand.
(Or, for that matter, trying to control intercepts of an incoming
bomber stream the old fashioned Battle of Britain way. Some folks
may sneer at SAGE now, but the ability to vector an essentially
unlimited number of interceptors (Or at least, all that were within
reach) against everything coming through that sector. (A manual
controller can only handle about 4-5 intercepts at a time. Sending a
stream of bombers about 60-120 seconds apart, with some reasonable
but more or less random horizontal spread makes it easy to saturate
the Command nd Control nets for that sector. A couple of guys would
have a Bad Day, but most would get through.) This was a major factor
in the Soviet's decision to supplant bomber development with
Ballistic Missiles. Soviet Bombers would have to grind their way
down through the entire northern stretch of Canada before reaching
any worthwhile targets, (Any Canadian targets being close to the U.S.
border), subject to continuous interception from Hudson's Bay south.
(About 1-2 hours at least)
It seems we owe a lot to George Valley, too.

--
Pete Stickney
Java Man knew nothing about coffee.

In article ,
says...
But don't leave out Admiral
Hopper. She was a major player in getting those electronical
thinkums to do useful work. I'd hate to be in a command bunker
somewhere trying to calculate an incoming missile's impact point by
hand.

??

Hopper is best known for her work in implementing and, especially,
evangelizing COBOL, a language poorly suited to real-time, physics-heavy
programs.

SAGE was an Air Force/IBM project, using, iirc, machine language.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

The loss of the American system of checks and balances
is more of a security danger than any terrorist risk.
-- Bruce Schneier

Kevin Willoughby wrote:

In article ,
says...
But don't leave out Admiral
Hopper. She was a major player in getting those electronical
thinkums to do useful work. I'd hate to be in a command bunker
somewhere trying to calculate an incoming missile's impact point by
hand.

??

Hopper is best known for her work in implementing and, especially,
evangelizing COBOL, a language poorly suited to real-time,
physics-heavy programs.

Hopper was involved with computing and computers (as a machine, rather
than a job description) since the beginning. She played a big part in
the Navy's Mark I, II, and III projects, which accelerated the
services acceptance of digital computers as problem solving tools.
She was a problem solver, who saw computers as a tool for easing
people's work first, and as a nifty toy second. (A useful
characteristic in this profession, and all too rare.)
Yes, she had quite a bit to do with COBOL, but that was only one of a
long string of achievements.
She's one of the big reasons that Artillerists are no longer guessing
the firing solution after dragging a tape measure across a paper map.

Those achievements, and the environment that they led to, created an
atmosphere receptive to the next big step, which was:

SAGE was an Air Force/IBM project, using, iirc, machine language.
SAGE was the brainchild of George Valley.
It had nothing to do with predicting missile impact points.
What it _did_ do was automatically identify and correlate radar
returns from several stations (Some reports have claimed that SAGE
got its tracking data by manual input via teletype - not so. Radar
sweep data was digitized and sent over teletype lines, and into the
system untouched by human hands. It was, IIRC, the first application
of modems.). It compared these tracks to known flight plans, and
assigned ranking to the targets. It could instantaneously and
automatically triangulate jamming targets. It could identify
dispersed raids, track a huge number of targets, and compute
intercepts to all of them, then direct the interceptors via datalink.
A SAGE sector also monitored the information and intercepts of all
the sectors around it - if a sector went down during an attack, it
automatically failed-over to the adjoining sectors. (Data sharing and
networking) It was, and still is, a damned amazing system.

Oh, and it wasn't entirely machine language.
MIT/Lincoln (Later Mitre) developed an Assembly language early on, and
there was a FORTRAN-like high level language.


--
Pete Stickney
Java Man knew nothing about coffee.

In article ,
says...
Kevin Willoughby wrote:
In article ,
says...
But don't leave out Admiral
Hopper. She was a major player in getting those electronical
thinkums to do useful work. I'd hate to be in a command bunker
somewhere trying to calculate an incoming missile's impact point by
hand.
??
Hopper is best known for her work in implementing and, especially,
evangelizing COBOL, a language poorly suited to real-time,
physics-heavy programs.

Hopper was involved with computing and computers (as a machine, rather
than a job description)

That's the distinction between "computer" and "computor".


She played a big part in
the Navy's Mark I, II, and III projects,

[insert obligatory anecdote about her tapeing a moth into the log of
Harvard's early computers, creating the neologism of a "bug" for a
misbehaving computer.]


She was a problem solver, who saw computers as a tool for easing
people's work first, and as a nifty toy second. (A useful
characteristic in this profession, and all too rare.)

Yes, agreed. I've had the pleasure of being in her audience a few times.
Once, back when the Computer Museum was located in the next town over
from my town (I.e., back when it was still in one of DEC's buildings in
Marlboro Massachusetts, USA), I wandered around the museum, accidently
entering the room where Grace Hopper was chatting with the museum staff.
To my dismay, she was a smoker. She was *short*, maybe 5 foot tall. Yet
she had a sense of presence, a --something-- that made it clear that she
was in charge despite the fact that she was in civilian dress and seated
while others were standing.


Those achievements, and the environment that they led to, created an
atmosphere receptive to the next big step, which was:

SAGE was an Air Force/IBM project, using, iirc, machine language.
SAGE was the brainchild of George Valley.

The time I wandered into her presence was during the time when Ronald
Reagan was talking about his "Star Wars" system for an impenetrable
shield against attack by the USSR. In one of those "my hero has feet of
clay" moments, I sat in the audience while Hopper explained how to test
programs based on various lists that the early COBOL compilers would
generate. To see one one of my software-engineering heros stumble,
failing to understand the complexity of a real time "it has to work
correctly the very first time" system was devasting. She really didn't
understand what people like Dijkstra
(http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/) and Parnas
(http://klabs.org/richcontent/softwar...nas_acm_85.pdf)
were saying about the complexity that realtime issues impose upon a
program. I left that lecture in a very sober mood.


It was, IIRC, the first application of modems.

Anybody who has any claim of being a software engineer knows about SAGE.
Not just because it was the first use of modems, but because it was the
first big distributed real-time system.


It compared these tracks to known flight plans, and
assigned ranking to the targets.

Yep. Also, it had one of the first graphical displays of information and
the first "pointing device" for interacting with those flight plans as
displayed on a screen.

That "pointing device" would later be recognised by Douglas Engelbart.
He created a "variation on a theme" that he called the "mouse". Apple
picked up the idea, and then Microsoft stole it and now we all have a
mouse or a trackball or some such device on our computers.


A SAGE sector also monitored the information and intercepts of all
the sectors around it - if a sector went down during an attack, it
automatically failed-over to the adjoining sectors. (Data sharing and
networking)

I've had to design and implement fail-over systems. It's hard enough to
do it with today's technology. To do it with 1950's technology is
amazing.


Oh, and it wasn't entirely machine language.
MIT/Lincoln (Later Mitre) developed an Assembly language early on, and
there was a FORTRAN-like high level language.

This is news to me. Do you have any references?
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

The loss of the American system of checks and balances
is more of a security danger than any terrorist risk.
-- Bruce Schneier

In article ,
Kevin Willoughby wrote:
Hopper was involved with computing and computers (as a machine, rather
than a job description)

That's the distinction between "computer" and "computor".

No, both were spelled "computer".

[insert obligatory anecdote about her tapeing a moth into the log of
Harvard's early computers, creating the neologism of a "bug" for a
misbehaving computer.]

Alas, this is a myth. (The defunct moth found in the equipment was real,
but it wasn't the origin of the usage.) The use of "bug" for a problem
with equipment goes back at least to Thomas Edison's lab.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |