The funny thing is while the Nolan Batman films were of-their-time in addressing an unauthorized electronic surveillance panopticon, it was the ‘68 Adam West sitting in his Batcave running his Bat-Computer and Bat-Analyzer over Gotham City crime data that accurately predicted computer-enabled crime fighting
That city journal article about California wildness fire fighting in the 1960s with an Apollo ass command center
Also going on in 1968: Operation Igloo White, McNamara’s (failed) high-tech effort to interdict North Vietnamese transports into South Vietnam. Some 20,000 acoustic/seismic sensors were dropped into the jungles of Laos. When they detected movement they sent a radio signal, relayed via a circling airplane, into the Infiltration Surveillance Center, a.k.a Task Force Alpha, at Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand. There the information was plotted in real-time, and used to plan (illegal) bomb runs over Laos.
The center itself used cutting-edge computer technology, and was quite a sight:
Step out of the jungle and inside the building, you step back into America—but an America fifteen years from now… maybe 1984. It’s beautiful… gleaming tile floors… glass walls everywhere. They have a full cafeteria where you can get anything you want. They even have real milk, not that powdered crap we get at the mess hall. And air-conditioning? The whole damned place is air-conditioned. There’s even a bowling alley and a movie theater. I and a whole bunch of civilians who look like IBM guys running around in three-piece suits all wearing glasses… it’s “Geek Central.” We never see them over on our part of the base, so I guess they have everything they need in there.
Then there’s this main control room that looks like the one we saw on TV during the Apollo moon shots, or maybe something out of a James Bond movie. There’s computer terminals everywhere. But the main feature is this huge, three-story-tall Lucite… or maybe it’s plastic, I don’t know… full-color depiction of the whole Ho Chi Minh Trail with a real-time depiction of trucks coming down the trail. It’s wild, man.
