Digital State: The Story of Minnesota’s Computing Industry by Thomas J. Misa (review)

Thomas J. Misa has produced a well-organized and well-researched narrative history that shows the significant role Minnesota firms played in the computing industry’s post-1945 development, especially during the period from the end of the war to the beginning of Silicon Valley’s ascendancy in the 1970s. The author, chair of the Department of the History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota and director of the school’s Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Technology, is an accomplished scholar in the field with multiple publications related to the growth, development, and significance of the computing industry. Misa’s technical understanding and expertise are evident throughout this volume.

An introduction lays out the subjects to be addressed in the book. Among these are the role wartime research and applications played; how and why many programs then migrated to Minnesota as the wars in Europe and the Pacific ended; the characteristics of these programs; and the various technologies they developed. Nicely linked to this clear introduction is a chapter detailing some of the many computer-based programs the US government established and funded in the tense period after Pearl Harbor, as policy makers and military officials sought to create a technological edge that could prove decisive in the war. With this needed context in place, Misa then organizes the book’s chapters thematically around the stories of separate companies. The main body of Digital State explores in detail the development of five different firms: Engineering Research Associates (ERA), Univac, Control Data, Honeywell, and IBM. Essentially these five chapters begin at the end of World War II and move chronologically through the decades, ending in the early 2000s.

The author does well telling the stories of better-known companies like Honeywell and IBM, but his account of the lesser-known pioneers like ERA is especially enlightening and demonstrates the strong research evident throughout this book. Misa describes how ERA began in the immediate aftermath of the war, relying on government contracts—with code-breaking and data analysis, for example—in the tense new Cold War environment. Secrecy meant the company’s work was little known, even in Midway, the central St. Paul neighborhood where it was located. But in spite of this, Misa concludes, ERA in the first decade after 1945 played a key role in the development of the computing industry in the state.

Another chapter has a different story to tell. “Industrial Dynamics,” towards the end of the book, addresses several issues related to the growth of the computing industry, among them how women were relegated to lower-skilled or lower-paying jobs early in the industry; the ways state government agencies used computers for planning; and the significant role computers played in schools, specifically with the Minnesota Education Computing Consortium (MECC). A concluding chapter sketches out links between this postwar computing industry and the medical devices industry, which from the latter decades of the twentieth century forward has had a significant presence in the area.

Misa consulted a variety of archival and secondary sources in writing Digital State, and these sources are listed in the bibliography. The literature is current and includes both books and articles. Annotated endnotes provide additional information. The sources also include more than fifty oral history interviews with significant personalities, the majority of which were conducted in the 1980s. Misa uses this oral history evidence throughout the book, relying heavily on interviews in the construction of the narratives in each chapter. Generally the author paraphrases these interviews, though, as opposed to quoting directly. When he does include passages from interviews, these are brief and integrated into the body of the narrative. Overall, this is a very good example of how oral history can be used in historical research.

Digital State is wonderfully illustrated, too, with dozens of period photographs, diagrams, and posters that give these interesting accounts even more life. Some of the technology discussed...