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Dahlgren 



Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) delivered to Dahlgren in 1955. 



didn't think it would really work, but the people at Watson Lab who were 

 sponsored by IBM and some different engineers who hadn't built the other 

 computers thought it would work, so they put it on the NORC, and that was one 

 of the significant improvements in computer technology at that point. When we 

 got the NORC, it was about 100 times faster than anything we had before, so 

 that opened areas of problems that would have been too costly or too time- 

 consuming on smaller computers. We started looking at areas like war gaming. 

 We got involved in simulations of amphibious forces and things like that which 

 required quite a bit of computer capability and a lot of analysis and time. 



About 1955, Sputnik went up, and the United States was quite embarrassed 

 that they were behind in the Space Program. We put forth a lot of effort to try to 

 do something about that. The Naval Research Laboratory [NRL] launched 

 their own satellite called Vanguard, which was about as big as a grapefruit, but 

 it was successful. Dahlgren was involved in that, some of the analysis of the orbit 

 trajectories and so on. That led eventually to the Naval Space Surveillance 

 System, which is now a separate command on the Dahlgren reservation but was 

 then part of this department. We got it started with NRL and did the computa- 

 tion on the NORC because it was a capable, fast machine. 



