Shipbucket

I'm currently in the process of reading "When Computers Went to Sea" which is a history of US Navy computing and in particular NTDS. The author mentions briefly at one point a "Project CORNFIELD" as one of the precursors to NTDS. The idea behind Project CORNFIELD was something that really only could have appeared at the time it did, when computers were still unique and massive monolithic entities.
Due to the size of computers at the time you wouldn't be able to fit two on every combatant (You'd need two for redundancy in case a vacuum tube blew out at an inopportune time) and instead you would need a dedicated "master ship" to carry a pair of navalized SAGE derivatives in order to coordinate air defense for the battle group.

As is fairly obvious the shrinking size of computers allowed for every ship to carry multiple computers and the project never went anywhere. The author provides two citations on CORNFIELD, one is behind a paywall that I'm loathe to get through and while I tracked down the other it didn't provide any additional information that wasn't in the book and didn't have any citations to follow.

I'm curious to see if anyone here has heard of the project before and more importantly has any further reading on the topic. It's the sort of out there concept that I have a fondness for drawing so I'm hoping I can find enough references to be able to do so.


On a final side tangent, I recall reading a short scifi story rears ago with a very similar premise, a dedicated computer for coordinating a battle group that required its own dedicated ship so the concept may not be unique and leaves me wondering if there are other proposals for dedicated computer ships hiding out there.

I don't have any familiarity with this subject, but I'll keep my eyes open in my reading.

Maybe try posting your question in the naval or electronics sections here: https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/
There are quite a few experts in these areas there that might be able to help.

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