1940 to 1949: Computing During World War II and the Postwar Era - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 72

There was a subcommittee on large-scale computing within the American In-
stitute of Electronic Engineers (AIEE) in 1946. Another association was the Insti-
tute of Radio Engineers (IRE), which had a committee on electronic computers in
1951. The AIEE and IRE would eventually merge in 1963 to become the Institu-
te of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), which would include the IEEE
Computer Society, whose headquarters are located in Washington, D.C. The IEEE
Computer Society has numerous conferences and publishes thirteen peer-reviewed
journals.
There are also computing and software associations in many other countries.
These include the British Computer Society, the Computer Society of India, the
Australian Computer Society, and many more. Computing and software have vast
nets of social groups that share information via conferences, journals and, in
today's world, the web.
In 1947, two inventors, Thomas Goldsmith and Estie Ray Mann, filed a patent
for using a cathode ray tube as a gaming device. This would later explode into a
multibillion-dollar game industry within future decades.
The Cold War Begins
In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, and this led to the
concept of mutually assured destruction , which meant that an atomic war on both
sides would probably blast everyone back to the Stone Age. The Soviet atomic
bombs helped to keep the Cold War cool, since neither side wanted a full-scale
atomic conflict.
The Soviet atomic bomb also had a major impact on computers and software.
A direct response to the Soviet bomb was a new and massive air-defense system
called SAGE, which stood for semiautomatic ground environment. SAGE will be
discussed in the next chapter.
In 1949, Nationalist Chinese forces evacuated the mainland for Taiwan and the
Chinese Communist government took over, which also led to tense relations with
Western countries.
These tense relationships led to military arms races on both sides, and part of
such escalation involved designing and building newer and more powerful com-
puters of both digital and analog forms.