In the past 30 years, growth in the area of data communications has been phenomenal, to say the least. During the Vietnam War, one of my duty stations was on an island in the China Sea. I was part of a signal intelligence group, intercepting and decoding wartime communications traffic. We did our best to decode and analyze the information we intercepted, but many times the help of a high-end (at that time) mainframe computer system was required. Did we have a communication network in place to upload the data to the mainframe, let the mainframe do the processing, and then download the data back to us? Not a chance. We had to take the large magnetic tapes and give them to pilots on an SR-71 Blackbird, who flew the tapes to the United States for processing on a mainframe computer system. Once the results were obtained, we would receive a telephone call informing us of any critical information that had been found. It is hard to believe now that 30 years ago that was the way things were done.
