ALTESS celebrates 60 years of technology support and services

Acquisition Logistics and Technology Enterprise Systems and Services (ALTESS) celebrated its 60th birthday in Radford, Virginia on June 14, 2019, a date which coincided with the Army’s 243rd birthday.  ALTESS has a rich history and first opened its doors on May 18, 1959 as the Ordnance Information Data Agency, providing Information Technology (IT) services to the Army.

During its birthday celebration, ALTESS welcomed current and former employees, family members and more than 40 local retirees whose experience spans the last six decades. Gary Winkler, former program executive officer for Enterprise Information Systems, was on hand to help cut the birthday cake.

One particular retiree, who worked in the ALTESS bunker from 1960 until 1990, reminisced about working with a water-cooled universal automatic computer weighing 38,500 pounds.  In addition, the retiree described working with a report program generator where some of the initial coding of subroutines was built using code that predated Common Business Oriented Language. These original Army IT pioneers provided highly sensitive battle damage assessments during the height of the Cold War. 

As a way of honoring former employees, current ALTESS Product Director Timothy Hale recognized each attendee by name, with their positions and time worked in the organization. Many stories were shared, memories were relived and friends were reunited.

“This day not only showed appreciation to the past and present employees of ALTESS, it also exemplified the family culture of this long-serving Army IT service organization,” said Hale. “It further demonstrated how ALTESS has kept pace and evolved with the state-of-the-art equipment over the last half century, now serving over 80 customers, more than 100 major systems and millions of users.