NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966
21 comments
·October 21, 2025georgefrowny
bbarnett
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/a-history-of-the-ami...
Even in the 70s/80s, some prototypes were hardwired.
Andrex
This is where the last location in Terminator 3 is based on, right? (Great ending.)
mxwll
Similar to Site R on the PA / Maryland border https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex
Animats
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.)
cm2187
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
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.
dylan604
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.
coredog64
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.
Espressosaurus
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.
MrDrMcCoy
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
> 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).
codeulike
There were no UI professionals in 1966
userbinator
Yet a lot of the UIs of that era were rather more intuitive than those today.
automatic6131
Show us the stargate!
rzzzt
Show us the Santa tracking device! ...it's probably an ADS-B receiver.
richx
I can recommend watching the excellent movie War Games, quite entertaining and still relevant. NORAD plays an important role in it.
null
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.