DATAR
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DATAR, short for Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving, was a pioneering computerized battlefield information system developed by the Canadian Navy in partnership with Ferranti Canada in the early 1950s. It combined data sent to it from various ships in order to provide commanders with an "overall view", allowing them to coordinate attacks on submarines and aircraft. The system proved too costly for the post-war Navy to develop alone, and when the Royal Navy and US Navy declined to share in the program it was ended. Oddly the US then decided they needed just such a system, and developed the Naval Tactical Data System to fill this role.
The genesis of the system started in a roundabout fashion in 1948, when the Canadian Defence Research Board (DRB) sent out a letter to various Canadian electronics firms informing them of their intention to start a number of projects that would partner the military, acadamia and private companies. A copy of the letter was sent to Ferranti Canada, then a small distributer of Ferranti's UK 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 he was disappointed to learn that while the DRB was equally excited, the amount of money they had to offer was basically zero.
Word of the meeting reached Jim Belyea, a researcher at the Navy's electrical laboratories outside Ottawa. 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 convoys. During World War II the slow speeds and short submerged range of the typical German submarine meant that they could be dealt with 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 he felt would require much faster reaction times in order to effectively deal with.
Balyea'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. However he had no good idea how to actually accomplish this, so he approached Ferranti, who had recently met with the DRB. Instead of the cash-strapped DRB, Balyea offered funding directly from the Navy itself. Everyone now seemed happy, 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 when 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 renued 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 30,000 vacuum tubes (another source says 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. The trackball was built using a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. In contrast with the US Air Force's SAGE system, DATAR did not develop "tracks" automatically, relying on the operators to continue feeding new data into the system.
The system was first tested in the fall of 1953 on Lake Ontario, the DATAR unit being installed on a Bangor class minesweeper. A "convoy" of three ships -- the DATAR, another minesweeper, and a shore radar station acting as another ship -- was successfully handled, 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 per unit in some sort of small production run, the complexity of the system meant it wouldn't be that much less expensive. In order to lower the over 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.
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 ReserVec and the Ferranti-Packard 6000 mainframe.
