History
Under the leadership of C. W. Halligan, MITRE was formed in 1958 to provide overall direction to the companies and workers involved in the US Air Force SAGE project. Most of the early employees were transferred to MITRE from the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where SAGE was being developed. In April 1959, a site was purchased in Bedford, Massachusetts near Hanscom Air Force Base, to develop a new MITRE laboratory, which MITRE occupied in September 1959.
After the SAGE project ended in the early 1960s, the FAA selected MITRE to develop a similar system to provide automated air traffic control. The result of the project formed the National Airspace System (NAS), that is still in use today. To support the NAS project and continual operations with the US Department of Defense at the Pentagon, MITRE opened a second "main office" in McLean, Virginia.
Through the 1960s, MITRE developed and supported military Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) projects, including the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). MITRE also worked on a number of projects with ARPA, including precursors to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ARPANET. Since the 1960s, MITRE has developed or supported most DoD early warning and communications projects, including the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System JTIDS and the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System JSTARS. Since 1998, MITRE has helped to modernize the US Internal Revenue Service.
During the 1980s, the German hacker Markus Hess used an un-secured MITRE Tymnet connection as an entry point for intrusions into US Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and NASA computer networks.
On July 10, 1985, mitre.org was the first .org domain name registered, and it remains in use by the company today.
On January 29, 1996, MITRE divided into two entities: The MITRE Corporation to focus on its FFRDCs for DoD and FAA, and a new company, named Mitretek Systems (now called Noblis) to assume non-FFRDC work for other US Government agencies.
In 2005, a team from MITRE competed in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and qualified in 23rd place for the final race. The team's robot, the Meteor, drove off the course a mile into the race due to a late morning dust cloud confusing the sensors.
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