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1 Philadelphia Story Wartime Origins of Minnesota Computing 17 In its early years, Minnesota’s computer industry was improbably but decisively yoked to the Philadelphia story. It’s odd that it turned out this way. The chronicles of digital computing often trace its protean beginnings across the Atlantic to Berlin, Manchester, Cambridge, or possibly even to London, if you credit Charles Babbage’s mechanical device that dazzled visitors to his fashionable salon in the nineteenth century . By rights the origins of American computing should have been in Dayton, Ohio, and the factories of National Cash Register. But Philadelphia was home to an important wartime computational complex at the University of Pennsylvania. It was also a short train ride from a Maryland army laboratory that had an unusual computing problem as well as deep pockets and military clout. The Philadelphia-based effort to build the ENIAC machine during the war—and commercialize the invention after the war—was one origin for the American computer industry. And, not least, the pioneering Philadelphia computer company and the pioneering St. Paul computer company were joined together when business machine giant Remington Rand bought them both and fitfully merged them, as chapters 2 and 3 will recount. Fallout from the resulting Philadelphia–St. Paul fracas triggered the formation of Control Data, discussed in chapter 4. And the Philadelphia story returned to a Minnesota courtroom in the landmark Honeywell v. Sperry Rand lawsuit treated in chapter 5. This chapter locates the origin of Minnesota’s computing industry in the military, industrial, and intelligence mobilizations of the second world war. Washington at War We now understand that World War II was an information-driven war—in the air, on the ground, and especially at sea—but the secret was unusually well kept for many years.1 Countless other wartime technical innovations were well known at the time. When two atomic bombs exploded over Japan, hastening the end of the war itself and ushering in the nuclear age that followed, they brought fame to the Manhattan Project and to the army general who led it (see chapter 3), while the effort to develop high-frequency radar for combat helped transform MIT into a research and engineering powerhouse. Proximity explosive fuses, synthetic rubber, operations research, and mass-produced penicillin were acclaimed wartime innovations as well. The massive mobilization of American industry was squarely in the public eye. Thousands of workers churned out unprecedented numbers of ships, airplanes, tanks, jeeps, radios, and a veritable river of gasoline and diesel fuel. There was simply no way to keep the wraps on the floodtide of military supplies issuing from the huge shipyards and automobile factories. Minnesota’s industrial base and educational capacity secured an important role in the nation’s military mobilization. The army built the immense Gopher Ordnance Works twenty miles south of the Twin Cities where three thousand workers made gunpowder for artillery shells, while the University of Minnesota trained thousands of technical workers for wartime factories, including more than a hundred women who built airplanes for the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. The ever-present battlefield K-ration was created at the university. “We bought the stuff down at Witt’s, the best market in the Twin Cities in those days,” physiologist Ancel Keys explained.2 War-related work at Honeywell and 3M, as noted in chapters 2 and 5, prepared these companies for the postwar economy. In comparison, the wartime achievements in code breaking that paved the way to the postwar explosion in computing—including the birth of Minnesota’s pioneering computer company—were scarcely recognized at the time. Code making and code breaking—the basic elements of cryptography—were the most closely guarded of all the wartime activities. It’s not easy to recall how this was so. For two months during the war, Alan Turing and Claude Shannon had tea together every day in the Bell Telephone Laboratories cafeteria in New York City, but because they were in different research cells they could not breathe a word about their top-secret work. They talked mostly about Turing’s remarkable “computable numbers ” paper of 1936, which soon inspired a compelling vision of thinking machines and artificial intelligence. Shannon’s wartime work created the basis for information theory as a problem in sending and receiving messages over a noisy and unreliable communications channel. “The work on both the mathematical theory of communications and the cryptology went forward concurrently . . . they were so close together you couldn’t separate them,” he noted...

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