If the United States Air Force were a private corporation, it would now own outright or, at the very least, have the basic patent rights to much of what is today collectively called Information Technology...including that most astounding of IT's progeny, the Internet. More than anything else, it is the Air Force's culture of innovation, chance taking, and steadfast vision of a technology-driven future that guided and spurred it along, even back in its earliest days in 1918 as an overlooked and insignificant arm of the Army Signal Corps. But even back then, portents of its innovating character seemed to hover about with every chancy flight by its bold young men in their flimsy flying machines.Much later, its quest for real-time command and control propelled it headlong into digital computing, which, in turn, birthed our modern era of instant information and communications. The bright boys at Maxwell Field in the mid-1930s, mainly Claire Chennault and Gordon Saville (pictured above), first tinkered with air command, which Saville would see brought to fruition in 1950 in an old laundry building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Bright Boys is the story of how the Air Force and their engineering cohorts pulled it off and why it's still so important...more than 50 years later."Proficimus More Irretenti" Motto of the Air Corps Tactical School, See: Television>> |
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