Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry

Introduction: Minnesota Goes High-Tech

INTRODUCTION Minnesota Goes High-Tech Minnesota’s computer industry transformed the state’s economy and identity in the years following the Second World War. Part of the reason this story has never been told is that Minnesota’s computing companies, while world famous in their own way, were never in the business of selling computers directly to individual consumers. They lacked the brand appeal of “Intel Inside,” the pizzazz of a Microsoft product launch, or the buzz of Apple’s distinctive products and advertising. Instead, the Minnesota computer companies made their reputations in selling computers to the government or to other industries. Indeed, for three decades or more they built their most highly regarded computers for the military and intelligence agencies, frequently behind the closed door of top-secret classified contracts. It wasn’t a secret to everyone. Insiders have known all along that the rise of the computer industry in Minnesota—centered on the Twin Cities and Rochester—worked a dramatic transformation in the state’s image and identity. By 1983 the state, despite its legacy of Scandinavian reserve, proclaimed itself as the “Supercomputer Capital of the World.”1 A world-class computer industry was all the more remarkable considering the state’s recent history. Minnesota emerged somewhat late as an organized territory of the United States owing to its geographic isolation as well as disquieting shifts, to white settlers at least, in the Native American tribes.2 Felling the state’s rich bounty of white pine trees in the north and planting the state’s rich soils in the south and west became the dominant economic activities after statehood was achieved in 1858, at least until a mammoth bonanza of iron ore deposits was commercialized in the north-central part of the state by the Rockefeller and Carnegie concerns beginning in the 1880s. Railroading and city building in Duluth, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and many smaller places absorbed additional energies in the following decades. In 1922, author 1 Sinclair Lewis, a native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, described his prototypical Midwestern city of Zenith (for which both Duluth and Minneapolis have claimed to be the model) as “a city with gigantic power—gigantic buildings, gigantic machines, gigantic transportation. . . . It is one big railroad station.”3 The state’s economy by 1945 was best known for milling flour, weaving woolen textiles, shipping iron ore to other states, and turning cows into beef in the vast South St. Paul slaughter yard. At the time, Minnesota’s economy could best be described as agriculture-driven rather than industry- or technology-driven. A distinguished visitor to the land-grant University of Minnesota had even scolded it for an undue focus on the agricultural interests in the state rather than devoting proper attention to its emerging industries. There were indeed some heavyweights in agriculture. General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill, Green Giant, and Hormel were among the nationally famous Minnesota-based agro-industrial enterprises that powered the state’s economy and impressed on it a distinct agro-industrial identity. Even a number of the state’s midsized industrial enterprises then developing, such as Lawn-Boy and Toro, two pioneer manufacturers of lawn mowers; Minneapolis–Moline, the prominent farm tractor and agricultural machinery maker; and the toy truck manufacturer Tonka (named with a Dakota Sioux word), had obvious though diverse ties to the soil. So did the 2 INTRODUCTION figure I.1. Washburn–Crosby Mills in Minneapolis (here circa 1879) merged with two dozen other firms to create General Mills in 1928. Today these mills are the site for the Mill City Museum along the Mississippi River. Source: University of Minnesota Archives. new firms Polaris and Arctic Cat, the leading early snowmobile manufacturers that transformed the land into an object of consumption and recreation. Much of the state’s high-technology industry can be traced to the pioneering computer company Engineering Research Associates. Founded in 1946, ERA delivered some of the earliest general-purpose computers in the country, using its wartime expertise in cryptography to help create the new world of digital computing. Although others have established their claims for building the “first stored program computer,” as discussed in chapter 2, ERA’s main claim to fame was in building and then successfully moving such state-of-the-art computers more than a thousand miles—at a time when other early computers typically never left the laboratories they were constructed in. ERA’s pioneering computer was...