Recent from talks
Control Data Corporation
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, Burroughs Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), NCR Corporation (NCR), General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. For most of the 1960s, the strength of CDC was the work of the electrical engineer Seymour Cray who developed a series of fast computers, then considered the fastest computing machines in the world; in the 1970s, Cray left the Control Data Corporation and founded Cray Research (CRI) to design and make supercomputers. In 1988, after much financial loss, the Control Data Corporation began withdrawing from making computers and sold the affiliated companies of CDC; in 1992, CDC established Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining affiliate companies of CDC do business as the software company Dayforce.
During World War II, the U.S. Navy assembled a classified team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery that would decipher codes from both Japanese and German electro-mechanical ciphers. A 40-member team in Washington D.C. produced some of these code breaking machines. The end of the war brought a great reduction in American military spending. The Navy believed that it was important for national security to keep the Washington team intact and working for them.
In 1946, the Navy approached John Parker, the owner of Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation, an affiliate of Chase Aircraft in St. Paul, Minnesota. They askled Parker about hiring the entire Washington team. The Navy could not tell Parker exactly what the team did as he lacked top secret clearance. They just told Parker that this team was important. Parker was obviously wary of the situation, given the lack of information. However, Northwestern had seen the termination of its wartime contracts with federal government and needed new one. After several meetings with high-ranking naval officers, Parker agreed to hire the team. Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a contract engineering firm, was formed in 1946.
ERA worked on a number of seemingly unrelated projects. One of these projects was the ERA Atlas, an early military stored program computer. The Navy intended to used the Atlas in their non-secret code-breaking centers. However, a controvery broke out in the US Congress about whether or not the Navy actually owned ERA. Losing money during this protracted legal debate, Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand in 1952.
Rand kept the ERA team together and started developing new products. However, the corporation was most interested in ERA's magnetic drum memory systems. In 1955, the Sperry Corporation bought Remington Rand, forming the Sperry Rand Corporation. The ERA division was folded into Sperry Rand's UNIVAC division. At first, the Univac Division assigned ERA to to provide engineering talent to support different projects. Eventually, ERA was assigned the UNIVAC II project. The ERA Atlas served as the basis of the Univac 1101 computer, followed by the Univac 1102, and the 36-bit ERA 1103 (UNIVAC 1103). The Univac development was plagued by lengthy delays and unhappiness among the team members.
In 1957, several ERA employees left Sperry Rand to form the Control Data Corporation (CDC). They were Robert Perkins, William R. Keye, Howard Shekel, William Norris and Robert Kisch. The men moved into an old warehouse across the river in Minneapolis. The partners elected Norris as chief executive officer of CDC. At the time of CDC's formation, Seymour Cray was still working at Sperry Rand. He wanted to finish a prototype for the M-460 Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) before leaving the company. Once he joined CDC, Seymour became the chief designer..
CDC started business by selling subsystems, mostly drum memory systems, to other companies. Cray joined the next year, and he immediately built a small transistor-based 6-bit machine known as the "CDC Little Character" to test his ideas on large-system design and transistor-based machines. "Little Character" was a great success.
In 1959, CDC released a 48-bit transistorized version of their re-design of the 1103 re-design under the name CDC 1604; the first machine was delivered to the U.S. Navy in 1960 at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address (501 Park Avenue) to Cray's former project, the ERA-Univac 1103.
Hub AI
Control Data Corporation AI simulator
(@Control Data Corporation_simulator)
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, Burroughs Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), NCR Corporation (NCR), General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. For most of the 1960s, the strength of CDC was the work of the electrical engineer Seymour Cray who developed a series of fast computers, then considered the fastest computing machines in the world; in the 1970s, Cray left the Control Data Corporation and founded Cray Research (CRI) to design and make supercomputers. In 1988, after much financial loss, the Control Data Corporation began withdrawing from making computers and sold the affiliated companies of CDC; in 1992, CDC established Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining affiliate companies of CDC do business as the software company Dayforce.
During World War II, the U.S. Navy assembled a classified team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery that would decipher codes from both Japanese and German electro-mechanical ciphers. A 40-member team in Washington D.C. produced some of these code breaking machines. The end of the war brought a great reduction in American military spending. The Navy believed that it was important for national security to keep the Washington team intact and working for them.
In 1946, the Navy approached John Parker, the owner of Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation, an affiliate of Chase Aircraft in St. Paul, Minnesota. They askled Parker about hiring the entire Washington team. The Navy could not tell Parker exactly what the team did as he lacked top secret clearance. They just told Parker that this team was important. Parker was obviously wary of the situation, given the lack of information. However, Northwestern had seen the termination of its wartime contracts with federal government and needed new one. After several meetings with high-ranking naval officers, Parker agreed to hire the team. Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a contract engineering firm, was formed in 1946.
ERA worked on a number of seemingly unrelated projects. One of these projects was the ERA Atlas, an early military stored program computer. The Navy intended to used the Atlas in their non-secret code-breaking centers. However, a controvery broke out in the US Congress about whether or not the Navy actually owned ERA. Losing money during this protracted legal debate, Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand in 1952.
Rand kept the ERA team together and started developing new products. However, the corporation was most interested in ERA's magnetic drum memory systems. In 1955, the Sperry Corporation bought Remington Rand, forming the Sperry Rand Corporation. The ERA division was folded into Sperry Rand's UNIVAC division. At first, the Univac Division assigned ERA to to provide engineering talent to support different projects. Eventually, ERA was assigned the UNIVAC II project. The ERA Atlas served as the basis of the Univac 1101 computer, followed by the Univac 1102, and the 36-bit ERA 1103 (UNIVAC 1103). The Univac development was plagued by lengthy delays and unhappiness among the team members.
In 1957, several ERA employees left Sperry Rand to form the Control Data Corporation (CDC). They were Robert Perkins, William R. Keye, Howard Shekel, William Norris and Robert Kisch. The men moved into an old warehouse across the river in Minneapolis. The partners elected Norris as chief executive officer of CDC. At the time of CDC's formation, Seymour Cray was still working at Sperry Rand. He wanted to finish a prototype for the M-460 Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) before leaving the company. Once he joined CDC, Seymour became the chief designer..
CDC started business by selling subsystems, mostly drum memory systems, to other companies. Cray joined the next year, and he immediately built a small transistor-based 6-bit machine known as the "CDC Little Character" to test his ideas on large-system design and transistor-based machines. "Little Character" was a great success.
In 1959, CDC released a 48-bit transistorized version of their re-design of the 1103 re-design under the name CDC 1604; the first machine was delivered to the U.S. Navy in 1960 at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address (501 Park Avenue) to Cray's former project, the ERA-Univac 1103.