MITRE
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MITRE is a US federally-funded research and development center whose main activities are applying computer-based automation to large and complex tasks. In the 1970s and 80s they would be referred to as a think tank, but this term is no longer widely used.
MITRE was formed in 1958 as a not-for-profit corporation under the leadership of C.W. Halligan, in order to provide overall direction to the army of companies and workers involved in the US Air Force's SAGE project. Most of the early employees transferred in from Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, where SAGE was being developed. In April 1959 a site was purchased in Bedford, Massachusetts to develop into MITRE's own center, which they occupied in September.
After SAGE wound down in the early 1960s, MITRE won a contract in 1963 to develop a similar system for the Federal Aviation Administration, to produce an automated air traffic control system. The result, the National Airspace System, was used into the 1990s. In order to support the NAS project, and due to their continual operations with The Pentagon, a second "main office" was opened in McLean, Virginia. MITRE also operates a large number of branch offices around the world, most of them co-located at major Air Force or other military bases.
Through the 1960s MITRE was mostly involved in military command, control and communications (C3I) projects, working on, among other things, AWACS. They also worked on a number of projects with ARPA, including the work that would lead to the ARPANET. Since then most early warning and communications projects have been developed by or supported by MITRE, including JTIDS and Joint STARS. One of their more recent projects is to provide a modernization plan for the Internal Revenue Service, which started in 1998.
With the slowing of continued military research after the end of the Cold War, the federal government set up several "Centers of Excellence", research teams funded at a low level to ensure that the teams stayed together in the future. Today MITRE operates three such centers, each based on one of their major projects. The Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) continues to work on the successors to NAS, the Center for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) continues on SAGE-like projects, and the Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM) is currently dedicated to the IRS.
External links
- MITRE (http://www.mitre.org/)