Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry

3. Corporate Computing: Univac Creates a High-Tech Minnesota Industry

Minnesota’s computing destiny, during much of the 1950s, was decided at Remington Rand’s corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Already before the war, James Rand Jr. had successfully stitched together the typewriter and firearm branches of his family’s businesses, all the while keeping a weather eye out for fame and publicity. When a granite-faced Tudor mansion originally built by a U.S. Steel president came onto the market in the old-moneyed part of Norwalk, Connecticut, he snapped it up in 1943. There he installed his company’s executives and made expansive plans for the postwar economy. The first step was hiring famous generals. Rand secured the services of army general Leslie Groves, the recently retired builder of the Pentagon and commander of the Manhattan Engineering District, to be head of research and development in 1948. So far as anyone can tell, Groves in the subsequent years spent less time and effort at the brand-new laboratory in South Norwalk than on traveling around the country giving speeches and burnishing his place in history as the builder of the atomic bomb.1 As chapter 2 recounted, Groves was not loved in St. Paul. To fill out his table at the Rock Ledge mansion, Rand named another recently retired army general as chairman of the board in 1952, around the time of the ERA acquisition when John Parker was an occasional guest. From then on, Douglas MacArthur also graced the weekly Thursday luncheons. These were events not to be missed. Rand loved to spark freewheeling rounds of “lunch-table inventing” where the assembled dignitaries dreamed about the next generation of new computers, though it seems they had little regard for the actual capabilities of the company’s engineers in Philadelphia or St. Paul or even the tabulating-machine factory just down the road. In a pause in the conversation after lunch, someone would invariably ask MacArthur what he thought about the latest idea for a technical breakthrough. 3 Corporate Computing Univac Creates a High-Tech Minnesota Industry 71 “He’d take a couple of drags on his corn cob pipe and he’d say, ‘Well, that reminds me of the time I was . . .’ and then he’d tell some sort of war anecdote not having anything to do with the question, but that was his charm.”2 One St. Paul man suggested that “MacArthur was very significant in terms of his contribution to the Univac image [especially] in Japan,” while another executive thought “he was magnificent ” in entertaining top executives to clinch sales.3 The 1955 merger of parent Remington Rand with Sperry, a company long known for sophisticated autopilots, gyrocompasses, bombsights, and other military-related precision technologies, might have set the computing world on fire. For a brief time, Sperry Rand Univac was in a singular position, at least until IBM trained its formidable sights on the computer market. Even so, Univac made the Twin Cities into a computing powerhouse, soon employing ten thousand Minnesotans and anchoring the state’s emerging computer industry. Spinoffs from Univac such as Control Data, treated in the next chapter, added to the region’s computing muscle and created the country’s first industrial district specializing in computing. And, notably, 72 CORPORATE COMPUTING Figure 3.1. Remington Rand’s “Rock Ledge” headquarters, 2007. This mansion was the site of James Rand’s “lunch-table inventing” with retired army generals in the 1950s. For years Minnesota’s computing future was decided here in Connecticut. Source: Noroton permission by GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2; Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. from Univac’s own Minnesota laboratories and factories came new computers that reliably networked the navy’s battleships and safely guided the nation’s commercial and military aircraft. What is more, Univac’s assertive and determined efforts to whip into shape its suppliers in the semiconductor industry worked an early “quality revolution ” that, as we can now appreciate, paved the way for “Moore’s Law” to kick in. Univac’s contributions to Minnesota computing, while grounded in the Twin Cities, played out on a national stage. Thousand-Mile Abyss With the Sperry Rand merger in 1955, Bill Norris was assigned the unenviable task of wrestling the competing units of the Univac computing division into some form of cooperation. From the start, it was tough going for Norris, the former ERA vice president and all-around troubleshooter. “Pres Eckert took the...