So, we were now officially residents of New Jersey. I drove 10 miles to Morristown to work. I worked for IBM, but we were subcontracted through another company. They had the contract to build a series of early warning defense systems. There were going to be about 20 of these sites built all around the perimeter of the United States. IBM was hired to do the programming for the project. The main site was called the PAR which stood for “Phased-Array Radar”. This is probably more than you want to know about it, but this is how it worked.
Conventional radar (like you see on ships in movies with their little array spinning around and around) can only see “line-of-sight”. They can only see in a stright line and they cannot see over the horizon or out into space. We (the United States) knew that Russia had developed an ICBM (Inter Continental Ballistic Missile) that they could fire in Russia and would actually leave the atmosphere of the earth, go out into space and then come back down on any target it choose in the United States. Since the missle would be coming in, essentially straight down from space, we would only have a few minutes warning before it exploded.
Well, that would never do. We needed more warning than that. So what was later to be called “Star Wars” was invented. We never called it Star Wars. That name probably came long after the movie came out. We were interested in building a radar that would literally see into space. That was the PAR. That was what I programmed. It was very cool. When it was actually working, they used it to map the craters on the moon and to study the Northern Lights and to map all of the “space trash” that is orbiting the earth. Associated with the PAR was another site called the MSR which stood for Missile Site Radar. Once the PAR detected an incoming ICBM, it was the job of the MSR to send off the missiles that would destroy it.
Dad