The First Digital Transformation

**A Comparison of RAF Air Operations System and Cloud Architecture**

On Veterans Day, it's an excellent opportunity to share with you on how World War II gave rise to our first digital transformation.

I've always been fascinated about learning history as much as learning the new technologies because there is still something new to learn and discover, and it sometimes gives us a gleam into the future.

Recently, I began to watch some newly made WWII documentaries again, and this time I focused on how the data shared within the organization and how new information was captured and relayed instead of the battle strategies and routes. In the Battle of Britain, the Royal Air Force (RAF) successfully defended the UK against large-scale attacks by Nazi Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe, despite RAF had fewer resources.

One of the main reasons that kept the UK from taking over by Nazi Germany and survived the relentless bombing was because of its sophisticated Air Operation System. To my surprise, it has a similar cloud and edge computing architecture in terms of data flow layers. In the edge computing infrastructure, we have the IoT devices at the edge of the network, collecting various data through sensors, and it could provide additional services after processing the data onsite and passes back the information to the centralized cloud.

In 1938, the UK began to build the Chain Home, a series of radar stations along the coast to detect and track aircraft. There were mainly two types of radar technologies that tracked aircraft at different altitudes. The information captured by the Chain Home and the ground observers was relayed through the Dowding system, a dedicated land-line telephone network to the central command center. In the RAF's Operations Room, you see that there is a huge table with a map of the British Isles and neighboring coastal regions of Europe. While the RAF Plotters constantly on the phone receiving the latest findings from the Chain Home, they quickly translated the information about the current position and altitude of aircraft by moving the markers across the map using a tee stick. The marker includes the Squadron number, Identification Friend or Foe (IFF system), pinpoint position, estimated altitude, number of aircraft, etc. The personnel was further divided into Plotters, Filterers, and Controllers. The Filterer jobs are to filter out information from different sources and decided which information is accurate, and this relied on experience and was one of the challenging jobs in the room. Squadron Leader Mike Dean MBE, referring to the Filterer's job, explained: "The mass of raw information generated by the Home Chain of radars had to be processed before it could be presented to the Operations Room. The complexity of the Filter Room task cannot be overstated. Much depended on the Filterer's detailed knowledge of the performance and limitations of each individual radar and their confidence in the ability of the crews on watch. The Filterer's ability to correlate the information quickly and assess the probability of the true radar picture underpinned the successful operation of the whole radar system." (Squadron Leader Mike Dean MBE, Historical Radar Archive, March 2011) Finally, the Controllers constantly observed the huge map table and reported back to a group of people include the fighter plots, Air Raid Warning Officers in the Chain Home radar stations. The Filter Room became the core of the air defense system. Every aircraft movement was carefully identified and logged into the system.

After the end of WWII in 1945, many pioneering technologies had emerged, and for the first time in history, digital technology became a reality from science fiction. According to Tom Green, the author of Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology and The Untold Story of Everything Digital, a decade between 1945 and 1955, there were a group of young and brilliant pioneers birthed the digital age. The year of 1949 should be marked as the first digital transformation where post-war projects, advancement on the machine, and electronics had come together, and the world went digital for the very first time. In that year, there was a breakthrough innovation in storing memory using the electrostatic storage tubes.

World War II indeed acts as an incubator for the birth of the digital age and a prelude to the first digital disruption and transformation in our human history.

References

Squadron Leader Mike Dean MBE, Historical Radar Archive, March 2011
Tom Green, The Untold Story of Everything Digital
Tom Green, Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology
Norman Friedman, Fighters Over the Fleet: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War