Software developer, MSR Target Selection
29 November 2014
Guestbook Entry
IBM had a building in Morris Plains which was near Madison. I designed, developed and tested my code there. Both MSR and PAR code was developed there actually. There was an IBM S/360 for development and testing. We did tests of the various pieces of software there and ran tests with simulators. Full simulation took 6 hours to run on one computer. Then I worked at Bell Labs in Madison and was a (daytime) Process Integration Test (PIT) Team Leader (putting all the pieces together) for a section of the whole function. Following that came the Functional Integration Testing (FIT) which put all process pieces together. I would run the complete system there in those tests (took 30 minutes for the whole scenario to run). These were run on 10 Bell Labs processors (multiprocessing). Six processors were devoted to the MSR Code and four were used for the incoming simulation. Full simulations at Bell Labs were done and everything was the same as the MSR site except we didn't have the radar face. Quite an exciting and fascinating process. Question: Do you know what ever happened to all that code you guys wrote? Not sure -- really don't know where the code is located now. I transferred (to Research Triangle Park, NC) from there after the Salt talks in 1973 since the decision was made that we would not implement the Safeguard systems. And yes, everything was classified. In fact, the piece I wrote was not to be mentioned by name since it could be used to help determine what process we used to ID the incoming warheads. There have been no follow-ups to me over the years about security so I'm not sure how much of it is still classified at this point.