Reeves was originally "Hudson American…just a little bit before the end of
D-Day" and in 1946
Reeves Sound Laboratory, a division of
Reeves-Ely Laboratories (R.E.L.), was researching "advance gunfire control systems and computers; radar and tracking systems;
guided missile controls; aircraft control instruments… (Research initiated 1942.)" RICO was awarded the
Department of the Navy contract No. N60ori-128 on June 10, 1946, for "development of a guided missile simulator and the operation of a simulation laboratory [for] research and development on guided missile simulation" and "development and construction of a rapid and precise automatic analog computer suitable for detailed simulation of guided missiles". The contract's Task Order III on June 12, 1947, required Reeves provide "a simulation laboratory, the Project Cyclone Laboratory, which was to be operated by the Reeves Analysis and Computer Group." Reeves built the lab's original Reeves Electronic Analog Computers in 1947, and a new computing lab of REACs was contracted under Task Order III in 1949. "The guided missile simulator of Task Order II was completed in early 1949 [with a] satisfactory demonstration in February 1949 of the guided missile simulator solving a three-dimensional guided missile problem". Early in the
Cold War, Reeves developed and tested the [AN/MSQ-2A] Bomb Scoring Central, a variant of the
MSQ-2 Close Support Control Set developed by
Rome Air Development Center. Bomb Scoring Centrals by RICO were used for
Radar Bomb Scoring (RBS), as well as
Korean War ground-directed bombing (GDB) controlled by TADPOLE sites. "Reeves Instrument Corporation [was] a wholly owned subsidiary of …
Claude Neon, Inc." on April 15, 1955, when the former merged into
Dynamics Corporation of America; and on January 20, 1956, the other Reeves division of Neon—Reeves-Ely Laboratories, Inc.--also merged into Dynamics. In 1958, RICO moved production to its
Roosevelt Field plant on East Gate Blvd in
Garden City, New York. In the early 1960s, the
Reeves AN/MSQ-35 Bomb Scoring Central was produced for
Strategic Air Command RBS and in 1965, the
Reeves AN/MSQ-77 Bomb Directing Central was built for
Vietnam War GDB. Reeves also produced a 1967 transportable variant of the vacuum tube AN/MSQ-77, and one of the AN/TSQ-81 variants was destroyed after the
Battle of Lima Site 85 in Laos. By the end of the war the vacuum-tube
Reeves AN/TSQ-96 Bomb Directing Central with a solid state
Univac 1219B ballistic computer was being used for GDB. ==References==