IBM OnGuard - 1956 RETRO Computer 2016-10-22 | At the height of the Cold War, the United States had to be “on guard in the sky,” keeping an eye out for the “supersonic, super-destructive and seemingly un-resistable” weapons carried by Soviet aircraft. Otherwise, our children would all end up dead. Or, worse still, they’d grow up to be communists.And so, in the mid-1950s, we built a state-of-the-art computer system with “electronic eyes” and “instant electronic reflexes” that could absorb and monitor a never-ending stream of data from across North America, grabbing info from radar towers, ships, military aircraft, commercial planes, and weather bureaus. “It was the first geographically distributed, online, real-time application of digital computers in the world,” according to IBM, the company that built it.
