[HN Gopher] NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966
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NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966
Author : zdw
Score : 62 points
Date : 2025-10-21 03:39 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (flashbak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (flashbak.com)
| automatic6131 wrote:
| Show us the stargate!
| sillywalk wrote:
| Trivia:
|
| Two real US Air Force Chief's of Staff appeared on Stargate
| SG-1 as themselves -
|
| Generals Michael E. Ryan and John P. Jumper.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| I hope the P in John's name stands for Puddle
| mttpgn wrote:
| Phillip
| rzzzt wrote:
| Show us the Santa tracking device! ...it's probably an ADS-B
| receiver.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm guessing some OCR was used to generate this by the many
| "typos" throughout.
|
| Comparing these images of the COC to what was reimagined for War
| Games really feels underwhelming. From the few images, it just
| feels very complex and overloaded with information that is just a
| lot to take in. Maybe it gets easier to deal with when that's
| what you do everyday, but it definitely has that feel of
| "designed by an engineer" instead of "designed by a UI
| professional". Essentially, it feels like every single UI I've
| ever made.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| Attractive to look at and information dense for an expert are
| two very different things that I think modern UI design has
| forgotten about.
|
| Everything is simplified down to a stupid hamburger menu if you
| want to do anything off the happy path.
| coredog64 wrote:
| My college roommate was stationed there from about 1997 to 2001
| and I was lucky enough to get a tour as a civilian. They took
| us into the VIP room that overlooks the room shown in most of
| the pictures and then they ran through an exercise. In the
| modern era, the displays were much more focused. There were a
| set of large projection displays along the wall. In the center
| of the room, the personnel each had a workstation with more
| focused information for their specific task.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| I got to tour it in the early 2000s. It was even less
| impressive to look at then than what these pictures show, and
| many of the rooms were rebuilt to be even smaller. One of the
| conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president were
| supposed to decide the fate of the world in a crisis was so
| cramped as to resemble that one scene from Attack of the Killer
| Tomatoes, but with nicer furniture. It was also amusing to me
| that with all secret operations shut down (to accommodate plebs
| like me), the skeleton crew left to run the place were almost
| entirely Canadian.
| noir_lord wrote:
| > One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the
| president
|
| I don't think the President would have gone to Cheyenne
| wouldn't have been time since Colorado is quite far from
| Washinton D.C - iirc the plan was always kneecap (NEACP[1])
| once it was online (and it still is).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-4
| codeulike wrote:
| There were no UI professionals in 1966
| userbinator wrote:
| Yet a lot of the UIs of that era were rather more intuitive
| than those today.
| cm2187 wrote:
| On the photos everyone looks busy, but I presume that the guys
| spent 30 years sitting in front of screens where nothing happen,
| except perhaps once every 3 months.
| wat10000 wrote:
| They had simulations, although I don't know how often they were
| run. There was at least one incident where a simulation was
| accidentally fed into the system and people came uncomfortably
| close to retaliating.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| Designing these kinds of systems in the 50s and 60s must have
| been one of the all-time peak engineering experiences. Nearly
| everything on paper and drafting film, stacks of databooks,
| nomograms, slide rules, electromechanics everywhere,
| stratospheric budgets, hand wiring, manually machined parts and
| just generally making up and discovering things, from machining
| to physics, as you go along that we now consider fundamentals.
| bbarnett wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/a-history-of-the-ami...
|
| Even in the 70s/80s, some prototypes were hardwired.
| Animats wrote:
| It's sort of a random collection of images. The first image isn't
| the command center at all. It's network operations, which is
| obvious if you look closely.
|
| For a few years after the downfall of the USSR and before 9/11,
| there were public tours. That was a happy, peaceful time.
|
| Here's a partial tour from the 1970s.[1]
|
| There is no one big control room. There are about a half dozen
| control rooms with different functions. There are duplicate
| control rooms outside the mountain, and for a few years, those
| were primary and the mountain only had a skeleton staff. Not any
| more. (Although Hegseth apparently wants to move some operations
| to Huntsville, Alabama.)
|
| Modern photos are available. Modest sized rooms with flat screens
| on the walls, desks, ordinary monitors, and keyboards. About the
| only unusual thing is that there's video switching, so that
| monitors can be copied to a big screen, or someone else's screen,
| when something is happening and many people need to focus on one
| screen.
|
| There's now a vast flood of crap AI art and mislabeled clickbait
| for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Sorting out the real
| from the fake is becoming harder.
|
| (One of my career achievements from my aerospace days was
| managing to avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work
| on their networking problems.)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd1yLwzQGO8
| richx wrote:
| I can recommend watching the excellent movie War Games, quite
| entertaining and still relevant. NORAD plays an important role in
| it.
| mxwll wrote:
| Similar to Site R on the PA / Maryland border
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex
| Andrex wrote:
| This is where the last location in Terminator 3 is based on,
| right? (Great ending.)
| rdl wrote:
| Seemed weird to me that they turned it into a secondary site; we
| were fighting relatively incapable-of-force-projection people in
| the mountains and deserts at the time, but even if Russia wasn't
| a clear threat in 2008, it seems like it should have been obvious
| EMP, conventional infiltration attacks, etc. would be reasonable
| threats in the future. Unless you're willing to go to fully
| dispersed command (and thus risk a commander at theater or below
| level launching on his own authority...), or run 24x7 airborne
| looking glass (which ended in 1990, and presumably was even more
| costly than modernizing Cheyenne Mountain Complex), what we had
| from 2008-2015 was clearly less survivable.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| "Unauthorized incoming traveler. Unauthorized incoming traveler."
|
| "Closing the iris."
|
| There will never be another SG-1
| cjcenizal wrote:
| House of Dynamite on Netflix is a realistic (at least it feels
| realistic) look at the modern day equivalent. It's fundamentally
| an exciting film but I also enjoyed learning how large scale
| human/technical systems operate during a nuclear crisis.
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(page generated 2025-10-26 23:00 UTC)