SAGE Building Stewart Airport, New York

One of the original buildings for the SAGE system, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, remains here on the edge of Stewart Airport, which used to be a military base. These large blockhouses contained computer systems that processed the information coming from the network of radar sites in the arctic, and routed it to command and control centers like NORAD. It was the nation’s initial electronic early warning system for Soviet bombers coming over the poles to strike the USA. SAGE was developed in the early 1950s, and was one of the most important early computer programming and networking systems, and led to the development of widespread networked systems of today. There are more than a dozen former SAGE buildings like this across the nation, most in use in some way into the 1980s. Some, like this one, have not been significantly redeveloped.