Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry

Notes

Preface 1. Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer,” 63n2. 2. Philadelphia-centered accounts of early computing include Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC; McCartney, ENIAC. 3. See Westwick, Blue Sky Metropolis. 4. Tomash and Cohen, “The Birth of an ERA.” A valuable source on these early years is Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from Univac. 5. Murray, The Supermen; Worthy, William C. Norris. A valuable essay on Cray as a “charismatic engineer” is in MacKenzie’s Knowing Machines, chapter 6. Control Data of Canada figured in Vardalas, The Computer Revolution in Canada. 6. Price, The Eye for Innovation; Misa, ed., Building the Control Data Legacy. Introduction 1. The “Supercomputer Capital of the World” formed a mock oversize license plate issued as a press release by Governor Rudy Perpich on November 21, 1983. Original held by CBI. 2. For the state’s early history, with full treatment of the fractious interactions between French traders, British colonists, and the several tribes of Native Americans, culminating in the 1862 Dakota massacre, see Wingerd, North Country. 3. Lewis, Babbitt (1920), chapter 7, available at tinyurl.com/8oqynrc. Sauk Centre is identified as a model for Lewis’s Main Street (1920). (All urls cited in these notes as tinyurl.com are expanded at www.cbi.umn.edu/digitalstate/.) 4. Norberg, Computers and Commerce. 5. Ralph Mason, “Twin Cities Boom: Electronics: Where ‘Little Guys’ Get Big,” Minneapolis Star (April 2, 1959); “General Mills: A Small Computer Operation,” Upper Midwest Investor 1:7 (November 1961): 17–18. Notes 245 6. Mason, “Twin Cities Boom.” The persisting concentration of the computing industry is a puzzle for locational analysis. Flawed data on Minnesota mars the analysis of Beardsell and Vernon Henderson, “Spatial Evolution of the Computer Industry in the USA.” 7. Special issue, “The Computer Industry,” Upper Midwest Investor 1:7 (November 1961): 4 (computers were a natural), 32 (few metropolitan areas), 41 (eight thousand people). On weather, see Rappaport, “Moving to Nice Weather,” 375–98. “Duluth Minnesota’s weather without air conditioning is preferred to that of numerous cities in the South and Southwest. But with AC, Duluth’s weather is the least preferred among the depicted cities” (379; emphasis added). Minneapolis is similar to Duluth, whereas such latter-day high-tech hotspots as San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Portland rank among the cities with the most desired weather (ibid.). 8. David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City,” New York Times (December 24, 2004), available at tinyurl.com/6b3tg (November 2011). 9. Marshall, Principles of Economics, book 4, chapter 10, § 3, available at tinyurl.com/ j2ab8 (September 2012). 10. Scranton, Endless Novelty. See also Belussi and Caldari, “At the Origin of the Industrial District,” 335–55; Markusen, “Sticky Places in Slippery Space,” 293–313; Zeitlin, “Industrial Districts and Regional Clusters,” 219–43. 11. Elizabeth Starling, “The Financial Services Cluster of the Twin Cities,” Metropolitan Council (October 1995); and Laura Bolstad, Dan Maloney, and Cynthia Yuen, “The Financial Services Cluster of the Twin Cities,” University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs (May 4, 2010), available at tinyurl.com/9nbrnxs (September 2012). 12. Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley; Ceruzzi, Internet Alley. Other recent accounts include Berlin, The Man behind the Microchip; House and Price, The HP Phenomenon. A classic is Saxenian , Regional Advantage. 13. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 1939–1945; Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change; Hooks, Forging the Military–Industrial Complex. 14. As detailed below, the British code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park were kept entirely out of the public eye until the 1970s, when the remarkable early computer known as Colossus was finally made public. See Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret; Copeland et al., Colossus. 15. For von Neumann’s notable career, see Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing; Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. A Neumann-centric view colors Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral. 16. Robert Emmett McDonald oral history, CBI OH 57, 16–17 (not online). 17. By comparison, Boston and the area south of San Francisco that in time became Silicon Valley, two other leading districts that later developed computing expertise, were each around 1960 firmly specialized in electronic components, such as transistors and early integrated circuits. DEC was founded as Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957, with a distinct aversion to “computing,” while Fairchild Semiconductor, also founded in 1957, which spun off the electronics giant Intel, was likewise a components company, not a computing one. “Silicon Valley” was itself named only in 1971. 18...