DATAR
Encyclopedia
DATAR, short for Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving, was a pioneering computerized battlefield information system.
Development on DATAR was started by the Canadian Navy in partnership with Ferranti Canada
(later known as Ferranti-Packard) in 1949. DATAR combined data from various ships providing commanders with an "overall view". The system proved too costly for the post-war Navy to develop alone, and when the Royal Navy
and the United States Navy
declined to share in the program it was ended. The US later decided they needed just such a system, and developed the Naval Tactical Data System
to fill this role.
(DRB) sent a letter to various Canadian
electronics firms informing them of their intention to start a number of projects that would partner the military, academia and private companies. A copy of the letter was sent to Ferranti Canada, then a small distributor of Ferranti
's United Kingdom
electrical equipment. The letter was forwarded to the then-CEO
of Ferranti in the UK, Vincent Ziani de Ferranti, who became excited at the prospect of enlarging their Canadian operations largely funded by the government. At a meeting in October 1948 de Ferranti was disappointed to learn that while the DRB was equally excited, the amount of money they had to offer was basically zero.
. Belyea had been developing the idea of an automated battlefield control system for some time, after having studied the problem of dealing with a coordinated attack by submarines on convoy
s. During World War II
the slow speeds and short submerged range of the typical U-boat
allowed dealing with them one-by-one, but as the capabilities of the newer Soviet designs improved it appeared that a coordinated underwater attack was a real possibility, one for which he felt an effective defence would require much faster reaction times.
Belyea's idea was to share radar
and sonar
data between ships, processing the data in order to present a unified view of the battlefield relative to any particular ship's current heading and location. Belyea had experience with naval training simulators, and thus knew that conventional electrical analogue computation and display would not be sufficient for DATAR.
However he had no good idea how to accomplish this, so he approached Ferranti, who had recently met with the DRB. Instead of the cash-strapped DRB, Belyea offered funding directly from the Navy itself. As Belyea was a lieutenant, he only had authority to approve contracts up to CAN$5,000. As a cunning solution, Belyea put out several contracts under different names all to Ferranti. This solution pleased everyone and the DATAR project was born in 1949, Ferranti setting up a new shop under the direction of Kenyon Taylor
in Malton
near the Avro Canada
plants.
By 1950 the small team at Ferranti Canada had built a working pulse-code modulation
(PCM) radio system that was able to transmit digitized radar data over long distances. With this success in hand the company was in a perfect position. The opening of the Korean War
dramatically shifted the government's spending priorities, and 100 new ships were ordered in 1951. Along with this came renewed interest in DATAR, and over the next two years they spent 1.9 million (almost 15 million in year-2000 dollars) developing an actual prototype.
The prototype machine used 3,800 vacuum tube
s (another source says 20,000, another 10,000) and stored data for up to 500 objects on a magnetic drum
. Data was sent to the system by operators on the ships, who used a trackball
and trigger to send position info over the PCM links to the DATAR, which was located on one ship in the convoy. DATAR then processed the locations, translated everything into the various ship's "local view", and sent the data back to them over the same PCM links. Here it was displayed on another console originally adapted from a radar unit. In contrast with the United States Air Force
's Semi Automatic Ground Environment
(SAGE) system, DATAR did not develop "tracks" automatically, relying on the operators to continue feeding new data into the system.
The trackball DATAR used was the first in the world, (predating the invention of the mouse
by 11 years) and was built using a standard Canadian five-pin bowling
ball.
The system was first tested in the fall of 1953 on Lake Ontario
. A simulated convoy was set up, consisting of a shore station and two Bangor class
minesweepers
, HMCS Digby
and HMCS Granby
. DATAR performed well, everyone being sent proper displays of the radar and simulated sonar "blips". The test was a complete success, and the Navy was apparently extremely pleased. The only serious concern was the failure rate of the tubes, which meant that the machine was non-operational for a considerable amount of time. Ferranti was extremely interested in adapting the DATAR system to a transistor
-based design, which they believed would solve this issue.
However, equipping the entire Canadian Navy's fleet would be extremely expensive. Although it would likely be cheaper than 1.9 million prototype cost if produced in any sort of production run, the complexity of the system meant it wouldn't be that much less expensive. In order to lower the overall cost, the Canadian Navy wanted to spread the development costs across a larger production line, and invited representatives of the Royal Navy and US Navy to view the system. They proved to be equally impressed; one US officer was too impressed and looked under the display console thinking it was a fake. But no matter how impressed they were, it appears they felt they could do better on their own and declined to get involved.
The DATAR project thus ended on a somewhat sour note. The system had gone from concept to working prototype in less than four years, and was by any measure a complete success. Yet the cost of deployment was simply too much for the Canadian Navy to bear alone, and they decided to simply do without.
and the Ferranti-Packard 6000
mainframe
.
Development on DATAR was started by the Canadian Navy in partnership with Ferranti Canada
Ferranti-Packard
Ferranti-Packard Ltd. was the Canadian division of Ferranti's global manufacturing empire, formed by the 1958 merger of Ferranti Electric and Packard Electric...
(later known as Ferranti-Packard) in 1949. DATAR combined data from various ships providing commanders with an "overall view". The system proved too costly for the post-war Navy to develop alone, and when the Royal Navy
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...
and the United States Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
declined to share in the program it was ended. The US later decided they needed just such a system, and developed the Naval Tactical Data System
Naval Tactical Data System
Naval Tactical Data System, commonly NTDS, refers to a computerized information processing system developed by the United States Navy in the 1950s and first deployed in the early 1960s for use in combat ships.- Reason for development :...
to fill this role.
History
In 1948, the Canadian Defence Research BoardDefence Research and Development Canada
Defence Research and Development Canada, also Defence R&D Canada or DRDC , is an agency of the Department of National Defence , whose purpose is to respond to the scientific and technological needs of the Canadian Forces...
(DRB) sent a letter to various Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
electronics firms informing them of their intention to start a number of projects that would partner the military, academia and private companies. A copy of the letter was sent to Ferranti Canada, then a small distributor of Ferranti
Ferranti
Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. Known primarily for defence electronics, the Company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but ceased trading in 1993.The...
's United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
electrical equipment. The letter was forwarded to the then-CEO
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
of Ferranti in the UK, Vincent Ziani de Ferranti, who became excited at the prospect of enlarging their Canadian operations largely funded by the government. At a meeting in October 1948 de Ferranti was disappointed to learn that while the DRB was equally excited, the amount of money they had to offer was basically zero.
Belyea's concept
Word of the meeting reached Jim Belyea, a researcher at the Navy's electrical laboratories outside OttawaOttawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
. Belyea had been developing the idea of an automated battlefield control system for some time, after having studied the problem of dealing with a coordinated attack by submarines on convoy
Convoy
A convoy is a group of vehicles, typically motor vehicles or ships, traveling together for mutual support and protection. Often, a convoy is organized with armed defensive support, though it may also be used in a non-military sense, for example when driving through remote areas.-Age of Sail:Naval...
s. During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
the slow speeds and short submerged range of the typical U-boat
U-boat
U-boat is the anglicized version of the German word U-Boot , itself an abbreviation of Unterseeboot , and refers to military submarines operated by Germany, particularly in World War I and World War II...
allowed dealing with them one-by-one, but as the capabilities of the newer Soviet designs improved it appeared that a coordinated underwater attack was a real possibility, one for which he felt an effective defence would require much faster reaction times.
Belyea's idea was to share radar
Radar
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
and sonar
Sonar
Sonar is a technique that uses sound propagation to navigate, communicate with or detect other vessels...
data between ships, processing the data in order to present a unified view of the battlefield relative to any particular ship's current heading and location. Belyea had experience with naval training simulators, and thus knew that conventional electrical analogue computation and display would not be sufficient for DATAR.
- "Belyea's basic idea of sharing precise real time radar and sonar data between all ships in a convoy, compensating for ship movement and distinguishing between friendly and enemy ships was years ahead of its time. Indeed, it was a quantum jump into the future and although I am by no means up to date at the time of writing (September, 2002) I am virtually certain that all modern naval task forces basically incorporate the Belyea concepts."
However he had no good idea how to accomplish this, so he approached Ferranti, who had recently met with the DRB. Instead of the cash-strapped DRB, Belyea offered funding directly from the Navy itself. As Belyea was a lieutenant, he only had authority to approve contracts up to CAN$5,000. As a cunning solution, Belyea put out several contracts under different names all to Ferranti. This solution pleased everyone and the DATAR project was born in 1949, Ferranti setting up a new shop under the direction of Kenyon Taylor
Kenyon Taylor
Kenyon Taylor was a British electrical engineer and inventor. Taylor was part of the original Ferranti Canada, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR system in the late forties and early fifties assisting in developing the world's first trackball. In the seventies, he developed the flip-disc...
in Malton
Malton, Ontario
Malton is a neighbourhood in the northeastern part of the city of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, located to the northwest of Toronto. The neighbourhood has a population of approximately 36,400 as of 2002....
near the Avro Canada
Avro Canada
Commonly known as Avro Canada, this company started in 1945 as an aircraft plant and became within thirteen years the third-largest company in Canada, one of the largest 100 companies in the world, and directly employing over 50,000...
plants.
The DATAR prototype
Pulse-code modulation
Pulse-code modulation is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form for digital audio in computers and various Blu-ray, Compact Disc and DVD formats, as well as other uses such as digital telephone systems...
(PCM) radio system that was able to transmit digitized radar data over long distances. With this success in hand the company was in a perfect position. The opening of the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
dramatically shifted the government's spending priorities, and 100 new ships were ordered in 1951. Along with this came renewed interest in DATAR, and over the next two years they spent 1.9 million (almost 15 million in year-2000 dollars) developing an actual prototype.
The prototype machine used 3,800 vacuum tube
Vacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...
s (another source says 20,000, another 10,000) and stored data for up to 500 objects on a magnetic drum
Drum memory
Drum memory is a magnetic data storage device and was an early form of computer memory widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s, invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria....
. Data was sent to the system by operators on the ships, who used a trackball
Trackball
A trackball is a pointing device consisting of a ball held by a socket containing sensors to detect a rotation of the ball about two axes—like an upside-down mouse with an exposed protruding ball. The user rolls the ball with the thumb, fingers, or the palm of the hand to move a cursor...
and trigger to send position info over the PCM links to the DATAR, which was located on one ship in the convoy. DATAR then processed the locations, translated everything into the various ship's "local view", and sent the data back to them over the same PCM links. Here it was displayed on another console originally adapted from a radar unit. In contrast with the United States Air Force
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
's Semi Automatic Ground Environment
Semi Automatic Ground Environment
The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment was an automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft used by NORAD from the late 1950s into the 1980s...
(SAGE) system, DATAR did not develop "tracks" automatically, relying on the operators to continue feeding new data into the system.
The trackball DATAR used was the first in the world, (predating the invention of the mouse
Mouse (computing)
In computing, a mouse is a pointing device that functions by detecting two-dimensional motion relative to its supporting surface. Physically, a mouse consists of an object held under one of the user's hands, with one or more buttons...
by 11 years) and was built using a standard Canadian five-pin bowling
Five-pin bowling
Five-pin bowling is a bowling variant which is played only in Canada, where most bowling alleys offer it, either alone or in combination with ten-pin bowling. It was devised around 1909 by Thomas F. Ryan in Toronto, Ontario, at his Toronto Bowling Club, in response to customers who complained that...
ball.
"Battleships" on Lake Ontario
Lake Ontario
Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the north and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario, and on the south by the American state of New York. Ontario, Canada's most populous province, was named for the lake. In the Wyandot language, ontarío means...
. A simulated convoy was set up, consisting of a shore station and two Bangor class
Bangor class minesweeper
The Bangor-class minesweepers were a class of minesweepers operated by the Royal Navy , Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Indian Navy during World War II....
minesweepers
Minesweeper (ship)
A minesweeper is a small naval warship designed to counter the threat posed by naval mines. Minesweepers generally detect then neutralize mines in advance of other naval operations.-History:...
, HMCS Digby
HMCS Digby (J267)
HMCS Digby was a that served in the Royal Canadian Navy. She was commissioned on 26 July 1942 and paid off on 31 July 1945. She was recommissioned from 1953-1958....
and HMCS Granby
HMCS Granby (J264)
HMCS Granby was a that served in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. She was commissioned on 2 May 1942 and paid off on 31 July 1945. She was recommissioned from 1953–1966 as a diving support ship....
. DATAR performed well, everyone being sent proper displays of the radar and simulated sonar "blips". The test was a complete success, and the Navy was apparently extremely pleased. The only serious concern was the failure rate of the tubes, which meant that the machine was non-operational for a considerable amount of time. Ferranti was extremely interested in adapting the DATAR system to a transistor
Transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...
-based design, which they believed would solve this issue.
However, equipping the entire Canadian Navy's fleet would be extremely expensive. Although it would likely be cheaper than 1.9 million prototype cost if produced in any sort of production run, the complexity of the system meant it wouldn't be that much less expensive. In order to lower the overall cost, the Canadian Navy wanted to spread the development costs across a larger production line, and invited representatives of the Royal Navy and US Navy to view the system. They proved to be equally impressed; one US officer was too impressed and looked under the display console thinking it was a fake. But no matter how impressed they were, it appears they felt they could do better on their own and declined to get involved.
The DATAR project thus ended on a somewhat sour note. The system had gone from concept to working prototype in less than four years, and was by any measure a complete success. Yet the cost of deployment was simply too much for the Canadian Navy to bear alone, and they decided to simply do without.
DATAR's legacy
Luckily the work did not go completely to waste. Ferranti Canada used the basic DATAR design on a number of projects, transistorizing it in the process. The system eventually led to both ReserVecReserVec
ReserVec was a computerized reservation system developed by Ferranti Canada for Trans-Canada Airlines in the late 1950s. It appears to be the first such system ever developed, predating the more famous SABRE system in the US by about two years...
and the Ferranti-Packard 6000
Ferranti-Packard 6000
The FP-6000 was a second generation mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so...
mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
.
External links
- The men who really invented the GUI By Clive Akass
- Richard Howard Gimblett, Michael Whitby, Peter Haydon, "The Admirals: Canada's Senior Naval Leadership in the Twentieth Century", Dundurn Press, 2006, ISBN 1550025805