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4. Innovation Machine: Control Data’s Supercomputers, Services, and Social Vision
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
A calendar from 1957 brims with events that reshaped the landscape of computing in Minnesota and the world. The events rippled outward from the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. The tiny radio beeps that Sputnik sent down seemed ominous to many Americans, who reasoned that if the Soviets launched satellites up into space it wouldn’t be too long until they might aim missiles down on North America. A new phase of the Cold War was at hand. Immediately, the U.S. Department of Defense created its Advanced Research Projects Agency with a mission of conducting farseeing military research, and soon the country’s aeronautics agency was transformed into a full-blown National Aeronautics and Space Administration. While NASA directly funded the space race and created a huge market for computing and controls, ARPA literally created the field of computer science with cutting-edge projects in computer time-sharing, graphics, and artificial intelligence, as well as computer networking that eventually became the Internet. Given this fertile environment of lavish government funding, urgent national missions , and rapidly growing markets, it is no accident that three remarkable U.S. computer companies were founded in 1957. Together they would reshape the nation’s and the world’s computing. Digital Equipment Corporation was the product of Boston venture capital and MIT entrepreneurship. DEC, as it was commonly known, dominated the field of minicomputers with its PDP and VAX series of machines, and it was for many years the anchor firm of metropolitan Boston’s “Route 128” high-technology district. In California, Fairchild Semiconductor was a spin-off from the research laboratory founded by William Schockley, the famed coinventor of the transistor. In addition to inventing the silicon transistor that found its way into NTDS (chapter 3), Fairchild built the first commercially successful silicon-based integrated circuit and 4 Innovation Machine Control Data’s Supercomputers, Services, and Social Vision 99 was the platform for Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore launching a second-round spin-off in 1968 initially called Integrated Electronics Corporation. Better known as Intel, it did much to create the field of integrated circuit memory; and the firm, one of the anchors for Silicon Valley, subsequently dominated the world market for microprocessors. Control Data Corporation, formed in downtown Minneapolis and staffed largely by managers and engineers from ERA–Univac in St. Paul, was the third notable computer start-up of 1957. The timing was propitious. The very same issue of Electronics that announced its formation was packed with the technological opportunities of the Cold War. It was a high-tech roundup that promised a boundless future for the new company: ICBM missiles and missile-defense systems, Sputnik satellite tracking, an “atomic bonanza” in Europe, forecasts of military research spending in communication and data processing, and direct coverage of how “pressure from Congress is expected to hurry U.S. space satellites.”1 This chapter examines Control Data’s thirtyyear history as an innovation machine. Lives and Legends The most frequently told origin story about Control Data goes something like the following, and it’s mostly true. Famous companies need famous founders and Control Data had two: William C. Norris and Seymour R. Cray. Cray and Norris were dissatisfied with Sperry Rand’s inept management and timid strategy, and they founded Control Data Corporation in 1957 as a way to re-create something of the glory days of ERA. Their motivating idea was that technical experts who knew where technology was headed should be the ones directing high-technology companies. With Cray heading the company’s engineering and design, and Norris providing strong executive leadership, Control Data brought to market an amazing string of computing machines. The first was the all-transistor CDC 1604, named in another mathematical pun—or so the apocryphal story goes2 —when the company’s new address of 501 Park Avenue in downtown Minneapolis was added to the ERA–Univac 1103 model. Fame and fortune came with the superfast CDC 6600 and the successor CDC 7600, widely hailed as the pioneering “supercomputers.” Massive profits from these premiumpriced machines made Control Data into a stock-market darling, with the firm surpassing $1 billion in annual revenues by 1969. Much, but not all, of this origin story is true. Norris and Cray were certainly the firm’s dominant figures and public faces, but no two men can make a billion dollars appear. Cray was still finalizing his work on the NTDS prototype computer, as chapter 3 related, when Control Data was founded...