System Development Corporation (SDC)

Contribution to AI

Someone had to discover that software was a discipline in its own right, and the discovery was made in Santa Monica against a deadline. IBM built the air defence computers but would not take on the programme, reportedly unable to imagine absorbing the two thousand programmers it would need afterwards; the job fell to RAND's systems division, which became a separate corporation in 1957. By 1959 some 800 people there were writing air defence code, by one estimate about half the programming manpower in the country. Since that many programmers did not exist, they were manufactured — schoolteachers and clerks recruited, tested and trained — and then they left, at roughly a fifth of the workforce a year, until by 1960 the alumni outnumbered the staff. That churn made a defence contractor into the industry's training school, and the practices it had been forced to invent for a project of unprecedented size went with the leavers into everything large that followed. Jules Schwartz's team also produced JOVIAL in 1959, the language military systems were written in for the next two decades. The AI inheritance came through the Q-32. Its ARPA-funded time-sharing system, running from June 1963, made Santa Monica the western counterpart to Project MAC: Lisp 1.5 was bootstrapped onto it from Stanford, the ambitious LISP 2 was built there, and Robert Simmons's group put English questions to the full text of an encyclopedia. In October 1965 the machine answered a dialled call from Lincoln Laboratory's TX-2, the first cross-country network experiment.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).