One of the 22 initial nationwide control centers for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system was located at Norton Air Force Base, in the Inland Empire. SAGE linked remote and far-flung radar sites and missile sites all over the continent, including the DEW line in the arctic, with computing networks that distributed the information nationally to command and control centers, operated by the military. Going online around 1960, SAGE was the world’s first large-scale real-time information processing system, and used these 22 regional control centers to collect, analyze, and move the information back and forth. SAGE evolved over the years, and while it might have helped spawn the computing era and the world of situational awareness, the massive blockhouses of its early incarnation have either been repurposed as brutalist relics, or removed. The blockhouse at Norton was torn down in 2018, and a distribution center was built on the site.