t Hartwell to M.I.T. researchers. Within a year of this event, Lincoln Laboratory received its organizational charter and com- menced opeation, its main purpose being the development of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system defined by Project Charles. Soon thereafter, the classified work at RLE was transferred to Lincoln Laboratory and became Division 3 under the direction of William Radford. There, fundamental SS research was performed, to a significant extent by M.I.T. graduate students, guided by Group Leaders Fano and Davenport. The acronym NOMAC, classified confidential at the time and standing for "NOise Modulation and Correlation," was coined by one of these students, Bennett Basore, to describe the SS techniques under study. The term "spread spectrum" was never heard at M.I.T. in those days. Basore's secret Sc.D. thesis [135], the first on NOMAC systems, was com- pleted under Fano, Davenport, and Wiesner in 1952. Basore recalls that his research was motivated by a desire to "examine how the probability of error The Historical Origins of Spread-Spectrum Communications for correlation-detection compared with the probability computed by Rice [228], which Rice showed approached zero under conditions consistent with Shannon theory." His thesis, which documented the results of this effort, con- sisted of a comparison of the performances of transmitted- and stored- reference systems operating in the presence of broad-band Gaussian noise. An RF simulation of a NOMAC system with multiplicity factors up to 45 dB was used to back up theoretical analyses. As in Nicholson's and Rogoff's initial experiments, the synchronization problem of the SR system was bypassed in the experimental setup. The carrier was obtained by amplifing thermal and tube noise, while the interfering noise was produced by some old radar RF strips made originally for M.I.T.'s Radiation Laboratory. Data were on-off keyed. A bandpass correlator was employed in which two inputs at offset frequencies were inserted into an ap