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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.

Key Information

Background: World War II – 1957

[edit]
The 12-bit CDC 160 and 160-A architecture were the basis of the peripheral processors (PPs) in the CDC 6000 series.
CDC 6500 with open panels. On display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington.

During World War II the U.S. Navy had built up a classified[1] team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery[2] for both Japanese and German electro-mechanical ciphers. A number of these were produced by a team dedicated to the task working in the Washington, D.C., area. With the post-war wind-down of military spending, the Navy grew increasingly worried that this team would break up and scatter into various companies, and it started looking for ways to keep the code-breaking team together.[3]

Eventually they found their solution: John Parker, the owner of a Chase Aircraft affiliate named Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation[1] located in St. Paul, Minnesota, was about to lose all his contracts due to the ending of the war. The Navy never told Parker exactly what the team did, since it would have taken too long to get top secret clearance. Instead they simply said the team was important, and they would be very happy if he hired them all. Parker was obviously wary, but after several meetings with increasingly high-ranking Naval officers it became apparent that whatever it was, they were serious, and he eventually agreed to give this team a home in his military glider factory.[4]

The result was Engineering Research Associates (ERA). Formed in 1946,[1] this contract engineering company worked on a number of seemingly unrelated projects in the early 1950s.[4] Among these was the ERA Atlas, an early military stored program computer, the basis of the Univac 1101, which was followed by the 1102, and then the 36-bit ERA 1103 (UNIVAC 1103). The Atlas was built for the Navy, which intended to use it in their non-secret code-breaking centers. In the early 1950s a minor political debate broke out in Congress about the Navy essentially "owning" ERA, and the ensuing debates and legal wrangling left the company drained of both capital and spirit. In 1952, Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand.

Although Rand kept the ERA team together and developing new products, it was most interested in ERA's magnetic drum memory systems. Rand soon merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand.[5] In the process of merging the companies, the ERA division was folded into Sperry's UNIVAC division. At first this did not cause too many changes at ERA, since the company was used primarily to provide engineering talent to support a variety of projects. However, one major project was moved from UNIVAC to ERA, the UNIVAC II project, which led to lengthy delays and upsets to nearly everyone involved.

Since the Sperry "big company" mentality encroached on the decision-making powers of the ERA employees, a number[a] left Sperry to form the Control Data Corp. in September 1957,[6] setting up shop in an old warehouse across the river from Sperry's St. Paul laboratory, in Minneapolis at 501 Park Avenue. Of the members forming CDC, William Norris was the unanimous choice to become the chief executive officer of the new company. Seymour Cray soon became the chief designer, though at the time of CDC's formation he was still in the process of completing a prototype for the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS), and he did not leave Sperry to join CDC until it was complete. The M-460 was Seymour's first transistor computer, though the power supply rectifiers were still tubes.[7]

Early designs and Cray's big plan

[edit]

CDC started business by selling subsystems, mostly drum memory systems, to other companies.[8] 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.[9] "Little Character" was a great success.

In 1959, CDC released a 48-bit transistorized version of their re-design of the 1103 re-design [10] under the name CDC 1604; the first machine was delivered to the U.S. Navy in 1960[11] 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.[12]

A 12-bit cut-down version was also released as the CDC 160A in 1960, often considered among the first minicomputers. The 160A was particularly notable as it was built as a standard office desk, which was unusual packaging for that era. New versions of the basic 1604 architecture were rebuilt into the CDC 3000 series, which sold through the early and mid-1960s.

Cray immediately turned to the design of a machine that would be the fastest (or in the terminology of the day, largest) machine in the world, setting the goal at 50 times the speed of the 1604. This required radical changes in design, and as the project "dragged on" — it had gone on for about four years by then — the management got increasingly upset and it demanded greater oversight. Cray in turn demanded (in 1962) to have his own remote lab, saying that otherwise, he would quit. Norris agreed, and Cray and his team moved to Cray's home town, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Not even Bill Norris, the founder and president of CDC, could visit Cray's laboratory without an invitation.[13]

Peripherals business

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In the early 1960s, the corporation moved to the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul where Norris lived. Through this period, Norris became increasingly worried that CDC had to develop a "critical mass" to compete with IBM. To do this, he started an aggressive program of buying up various companies[14] to round out CDC's peripheral lineup. In general, they tried to offer a product to compete with any of IBM's, but running 10% faster and costing 10% less. This was not always easy to achieve.

One of its first peripherals was a tape transport, which led to some internal wrangling as the Peripherals Equipment Division attempted to find a reasonable way to charge other divisions of the company for supplying the devices. If the division simply "gave" them away at cost as part of a system purchase, they would never have a real budget of their own. Instead, a plan was established in which it would share profits with the divisions selling its peripherals, a plan eventually used throughout the company.

The tape transport was followed by the 405 Card Reader and the 415 Card Punch,[15] followed by a series of tape drives and drum printers, all of which were designed in-house. The printer business was initially supported by Holley Carburetor in the Rochester, Michigan suburb outside of Detroit. They later formalized this by creating a jointly held company, Holley Computer Products. Holley later sold its stake back to CDC, the remainder becoming the Rochester Division.

Train printers and band printers in Rochester were developed in a joint venture with NCR and ICL, with CDC holding controlling interest. This joint venture was known as Computer Peripherals, Inc. (CPI).[16] In the early 80s, it was merged with dot matrix computer printer manufacturer Centronics.

Norris was particularly interested in breaking out of the punched card–based workflow, where IBM held a stranglehold. He eventually decided to buy Rabinow Engineering, one of the pioneers of optical character recognition (OCR) systems. The idea was to bypass the entire punched card stage by having the operators simply type onto normal paper pages with an OCR-friendly typewriter font, and then submit those pages to the computer. Since a typewritten page contains much more information than a punched card (which has essentially one line of text from a page), this would offer savings all around. This seemingly simple task turned out to be much harder than anyone expected, and while CDC became a major player in the early days of OCR systems, OCR has remained a niche product to this day. Rabinow's plant in Rockville, MD was closed in 1976, and CDC left the business.

With the continued delays on the OCR project, it became clear that punched cards were not going to go away any time soon, and CDC had to address this as quickly as possible. Although the 405 remained in production, it was an expensive machine to build. So another purchase was made, Bridge Engineering, which offered a line of lower-cost as well as higher-speed card punches. All card-handling products were moved to what became the Valley Forge Division after Bridge moved to a new factory, with the tape transports to follow. Later, the Valley Forge and Rochester divisions were spun off to form a new joint company with National Cash Register (later NCR Corporation), Computer Peripherals Inc (CPI), to share development and production costs across the two companies. ICL later joined the effort. Eventually the Rochester Division was sold to Centronics in 1982.

Another side effect of Norris's attempts to diversify was the creation of a number of service bureaus that ran jobs on behalf of smaller companies that could not afford to buy computers. This was never very profitable, and in 1965, several managers suggested that the unprofitable centers be closed in a cost-cutting measure. Nevertheless, Norris was so convinced of the idea that he refused to accept this, and ordered an across-the-board "belt tightening" instead.

Control Data Institute

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Control Data created an international technical/computer vocational school from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. By the late 1970s there were sixty-nine learning centers worldwide, serving 18,000 students.[17]

CDC 6600: defining supercomputing

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CDC 6600
Main article: CDC 6000 series

Meanwhile, at the new Chippewa Falls lab, Seymour Cray, Jim Thornton, and Dean Roush put together a team of 34 engineers, which continued work on the new computer design. One of the ways they hoped to improve the CDC 1604 was to use better transistors, and Cray used the new silicon transistors using the planar process, developed by Fairchild Semiconductor. These were much faster than the germanium transistors in the 1604, without the drawbacks of the older mesa silicon transistors. The speed of light restriction forced a more compact design with refrigeration designed by Dean Roush.[18] In 1964, the resulting computer was released onto the market as the CDC 6600, out-performing everything on the market by roughly ten times. When it sold over 100 units at $8 million ($81 million in 2024 dollars) each; it was considered a supercomputer.

The 6600 had a 100ns, transistor-based CPU (Central Processing Unit) with multiple asynchronous functional units, using 10 logical, external I/O processors to off-load many common tasks and core memory. That way, the CPU could devote all of its time and circuitry to processing actual data, while the other controllers dealt with the mundane tasks like punching cards and running disk drives. Using late-model compilers, the machine attained a standard mathematical operations rate of 500 kiloFLOPS, but handcrafted assembly managed to deliver approximately 1 megaFLOPS. A simpler, albeit much slower and less expensive version, implemented using a more traditional serial processor design rather than the 6600's parallel functional units, was released as the CDC 6400, and a two-processor version of the 6400 is called the CDC 6500.

A FORTRAN compiler, known as MNF (Minnesota FORTRAN), was developed by Lawrence A. Liddiard and E. James Mundstock at the University of Minnesota for the 6600.[19]

After the delivery of the 6600 IBM took notice of this new company. In 1965 IBM started an effort to build a machine that would be faster than the 6600, the ACS-1. Two hundred people were gathered on the U.S. West Coast to work on the project, away from corporate prodding, in an attempt to mirror Cray's off-site lab. The project produced interesting computer architecture and technology, but it was not compatible with IBM's hugely successful System/360 line of computers. The engineers were directed to make it 360-compatible, but that compromised its performance. The ACS was canceled in 1969, without ever being produced for customers. Many of the engineers left the company, leading to a brain-drain in IBM's high-performance departments.

In the meantime, IBM announced a new System/360 model, the Model 92, which would be just as fast as CDC's 6600. Although this machine did not exist, sales of the 6600 dropped drastically while people waited for the release of the mythical Model 92. Norris did not take this tactic, dubbed as fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), lying down, and in an extensive antitrust lawsuit launched against IBM a year later, he eventually won a settlement valued at $80 million.[20] As part of the settlement, he picked up IBM's subsidiary, Service Bureau Corporation (SBC), which ran computer processing for other corporations on its own computers. SBC fitted nicely into CDC's existing service bureau offerings.[21]

During the designing of the 6600, CDC had set up Project SPIN to supply the system with a high speed hard disk memory system. At the time it was unclear if disks would replace magnetic memory drums, or whether fixed or removable disks would become the more prevalent. SPIN explored all of these approaches, and eventually delivered a 28" diameter fixed disk and a smaller multi-platter 14" removable disk-pack system. Over time, the hard disk business pioneered in SPIN became a major product line.

CDC 7600 and 8600

[edit]
CDC 7600, serial no. 1
Main articles: CDC 7600 and CDC 8600

In the same month it won its lawsuit against IBM, CDC announced its new computer, the CDC 7600[22] (previously referred to as the 6800 within CDC). This machine's hardware clock speed was almost four times that of the 6600 (36 MHz vs. 10 MHz), with a 27.5 ns clock cycle, and it offered considerably more than four times the total throughput, with much of the speed increase coming from extensive use of pipelining.

The 7600 did not sell well because it was introduced during the 1969 downturn in the U.S. national economy. Its complexity had led to poor reliability. The machine was not totally compatible with the 6000-series and required a completely different operating system, which like most new OSs, was primitive. The 7600 project paid for itself, but damaged CDC's reputation. The 7600 memory had a split primary- and secondary-memory which required user management but was more than fast enough to make it the fastest uniprocessor from 1969 to 1976. A few dozen 7600s were the computers of choice at supercomputer centers around the world.

Cray then turned to the design of the CDC 8600. This design included four 7600-like processors in a single, smaller case. The smaller size and shorter signal paths allowed the 8600 to run at much higher clock speeds which, together with faster memory, provided most of the performance gains. The 8600, however, belonged to the "old school" in terms of its physical construction, and it used individual components soldered to circuit boards. The design was so compact that cooling the CPU modules proved effectively impossible, and access for maintenance difficult. An abundance of hot-running solder joints ensured that the machines did not work reliably; Cray recognized that a re-design was needed.

The STAR and the Cyber

[edit]
Main articles: CDC STAR-100 and CDC Cyber

In addition to the redesign of the 8600, CDC had another project called the CDC STAR-100 under way, led by Cray's former collaborator on the 6600/7600, Jim Thornton. Unlike the 8600's "four computers in one box" solution to the speed problem, the STAR was a new design using a unit that we know today as the vector processor. By highly pipelining mathematical instructions with purpose-built instructions and hardware, mathematical processing is dramatically improved in a machine that was otherwise slower than a 7600. Although the particular set of problems it would be best at solving was limited compared to the general-purpose 7600, it was for solving exactly these problems that customers would buy CDC machines.

Since these two projects competed for limited funds during the late 1960s, Norris felt that the company could not support simultaneous development of the STAR and a complete redesign of the 8600. Therefore, Cray left CDC to form the Cray Research company in 1972. Norris remained, however, a staunch supporter of Cray, and invested money into Cray's new company. In 1974 CDC released the STAR,[23] designated as the Cyber 203. It turned out to have "real world" performance that was considerably worse than expected. STAR's chief designer, Jim Thornton, then left CDC to form the Network Systems Corporation.

In 1975, a STAR-100 was placed into service in a Control Data service center which was considered the first supercomputer in a data center. Founder William C. Norris presided at the podium for the press conference announcing the new service. Publicity was a key factor in making the announcement a success by coordinating the event with Guinness; thus, establishing the Star-100 as "The most powerful and fastest computer" which was published in the Guinness Book of World Records. The late Duane Andrews, Public Relations, was responsible for coordinating this event. Andrews successfully attracted many influential editors including the research editor at Business Week who chronicled this publicity release "... as the most exciting public event he attended in 20 years". Sharing the podium were William C. Norris, Boyd Jones V.P. and S. Steve Adkins, Data Center Manager. It was extremely rare for Bill Norris to take the podium being a very private individual. Also, during the lunch at a local country club, Norris signed a huge stack of certificates attesting to the record which were printed by the Star 100 on printer paper produced in our Lincoln, Nebraska plant. The paper included a half-tone photo of the Star 100. The main customers of the STAR-100 data center were oil companies running oil reservoir simulations. Most notably was the simulation controlled from a terminal in Texas which solved oil extraction simulations for oil fields in Kuwait. A front page Wall Street Journal news article resulted in acquiring a new user, Allis-Chalmers, for simulation of a damaged hydroelectric turbine in a Norwegian mountain hydropower plant.

A variety of systems based on the basic 6600/7600 architecture were repackaged in different price/performance categories of the CDC Cyber, which became CDC's main product line in the 1970s. An updated version of the STAR architecture, the Cyber 205, had considerably better performance than the original. By this time, however, Cray's own designs, like the Cray-1, were using the same basic design techniques as the STAR, but were computing much faster. The Star 100 was able to process vectors up to 64K (65536) elements, versus 64 elements for the Cray-1, but the Star 100 took much longer for initiating the operation so the Cray-1 outperformed with short vectors.

Sales of the STAR were weak, but Control Data Corp. produced a successor system, the Cyber 200/205, that gave Cray Research some competition. CDC also embarked on a number of special projects for its clients, who produced an even smaller number of black project computers. The CDC Advanced Flexible Processor (AFP), also known as CYBER PLUS, was one such machine.

Another design direction was the "Cyber 80" project, which was aimed at release in 1980. This machine could run old 6600-style programs, and also had a completely new 64-bit architecture. The concept behind Cyber 80 was that current 6000-series users would migrate to these machines with relative ease. The design and debugging of these machines went on past 1980, and the machines were eventually released under other names.

CDC was also attempting to diversify its revenue from hardware into services and this included its promotion of the PLATO computer-aided learning system, which ran on Cyber hardware and incorporated many early computer interface innovations including bit-mapped touchscreen terminals.

Magnetic Peripherals Inc.

[edit]
"Imprimis Technology" redirects here. For the expansion card manufacturer, see Boca Research.

Meanwhile, several very large Japanese manufacturing firms were entering the market. The supercomputer market was too small to support more than a handful of companies, so CDC started looking for other markets. One of these was the hard disk drive (HDD) market.

Magnetic Peripherals Inc., later Imprimis Technology, was originally a joint venture with Honeywell formed in 1975 to manufacture HDDs for both companies. CII-Honeywell Bull later purchased a 3 percent interest in MPI from Honeywell. Sperry became a partner in 1983 with 17 percent, making the ownership split CDC (67%) and Honeywell (17%). MPI was a captive supplier to its parents. It sold on an OEM basis only to them,[24] while CDC sold MPI product to third parties under its brand name.

It became a major player in the HDD market. It was the worldwide leader in 14-inch disk drive technology in the OEM marketplace in the late 1970s and early 1980s especially with its SMD (Storage Module Device) and CMD (Cartridge Module Drive), with its plant at Brynmawr in the South Wales valleys running 24/7 production. The Magnetic Peripherals division in Brynmawr had produced 1 million disks and 3 million magnetic tapes by October 1979. CDC was an early developer of the eight-inch drive technology with products from its MPI Oklahoma City Operation. Its CDC Wren series drives were particularly popular with high end users, although it was behind the capacity growth and performance curves of numerous startups such as Micropolis, Atasi, Maxtor, and Quantum. CDC also co-developed the now universal Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) interface with Compaq and Western Digital, which was aimed at lowering the cost of adding low-performance drives.

CDC founded a separate division called Rigidyne in Simi Valley, California, to develop 3.5-inch drives using technology from the Wren series. These were marketed by CDC as the "Swift" series, and were among the first high-performance 3.5-inch drives on the market at their introduction in 1987.

In September 1988, CDC merged Rigidyne and MPI into the umbrella subsidiary of Imprimis Technology. The next year, Seagate Technology purchased Imprimis for $250 million in cash, 10.7 million in Seagate stock and a $50 million promissory note.[25][26]

Investments

[edit]

Control Data held interests in other companies including computer research company Arbitron, Commercial Credit Corporation and Ticketron.[27]

Commercial Credit Corporation

[edit]

In 1968, Commercial Credit Corporation was the target of a hostile takeover by Loews Inc.[28] Loews had acquired nearly 10% of CCC, which it intended to break up on acquisition.[29] To avoid the takeover, CCC forged a deal with CDC lending them the money to purchase control in CCC instead, and "That is how a computer company came to own a fleet of fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay."[30] By the 1980s, Control Data entered an unstable period, which resulted in the company liquidating many of their assets. In 1986, Sandy Weill convinced the Control Data management to spin off their Commercial Credit subsidiary to prevent the company's potential liquidation. Over a period of years, Weill used Commercial Credit to build an empire that became Citigroup.[31] In 1999, Commercial Credit was renamed CitiFinancial, and in 2011, the full-service network of US CitiFinancial branches were renamed OneMain Financial.[32]

Ticketron

[edit]
Main article: Ticketron

In 1969, Control Data acquired 51% of Ticketron for $3.9 million from Cemp Investments.[33] In 1970, Ticketron became the sole computerized ticketing provider in the United States.[33] In 1973, Control Data increased the size of its investment.

Ticketron also provided ticketing terminals and back-end infrastructure for parimutuel betting, and provided similar services for a number of US lotteries, including those in New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington and Maryland.[27]

By the mid 1980s, Ticketron was CDC's most profitable business with revenue of $120 million and CDC, which was loss-making at the time, considered selling the business.[27] In 1990 the majority of Ticketron's assets and business, with the exception of a small antitrust carve-out for Broadway's "Telecharge" business-unit, were bought by The Carlyle Group who sold it the following year to rival Ticketmaster.[34]

ETA Systems, wind-down and sale of assets

[edit]

CDC decided to fight for the high-performance niche, but Norris considered that the company had become moribund and unable to quickly design competitive machines. In 1983 he set up a spinoff company, ETA Systems, whose design goal was a machine processing data at 10 GFLOPs, about 40 times the speed of the Cray-1. The design never fully matured, and it was unable to reach its goals. Nevertheless, the product was one of the fastest computers on the market, and 7 liquid nitrogen-cooled and 27 smaller air cooled versions of the computers were sold during the next few years. They used the new CMOS chips, which produced much less heat. The effort ended after half-hearted attempts to sell ETA Systems. In 1989, most of the employees of ETA Systems were laid off, and the remaining ones were folded into CDC.

Logo of Control Data Systems
Logo of Control Data Systems

Despite having valuable technology, CDC still suffered huge losses in 1985 ($567 million[27]) and 1986 while attempting to reorganize. As a result, in 1987 it sold its PathLab Laboratory Information System to 3M.[35] While CDC was still making computers, it was decided that hardware manufacturing was no longer as profitable as it used to be, and so in 1988 it was decided to leave the industry, bit by bit. The first division to go was Imprimis. After that, CDC sold other assets such as VTC (a chip maker that specialized in mass-storage circuitry and was closely linked with MPI), and non-computer-related assets like Ticketron.

In 1988, Control Data announced its Transparent Computing Environment strategy, integrating its Cyber product ranges with personal computers and workstation products, aiming to support standards-based networking and programming languages, and implementing Unix on its workstation, mainframe and ETA supercomputer product lines. The company had already introduced rebadged Silicon Graphics workstations in the form of the Cyber 910 family and had taken a 20% stake in the workstation manufacturer.[36] The first Cyber 910 workstation, the 910-300, was introduced in 1986 and was based on SGI's Iris 3100 model employing the Motorola 68020 processor.[37] The range would eventually expand, tracking SGI's migration to the MIPS processor architecture, introducing workstation and server models employing the R2000 and R3000 processors and running SGI's IRIX operating system.[38]

In 1992, the company separated into two independent companies – the computer businesses were spun out as Control Data Systems, Inc. (CDS), while the information service businesses became the Ceridian Corporation.[39] One reason stated for the separation was the inability to find investors that would fund a company "with interests as diverse as proprietary mainframes, Unix, military and government software and services and a lottery business".[40]

CDS later became owner of ICEM Technologies, makers of ICEM DDN and ICEM Surf software and sold the business to PTC for $40.6m in 1998.[41] In 1999, CDS was bought out by Syntegra, a subsidiary of the BT Group, and merged into BT's Global Services organization.

Ceridian continues as a successful outsourced IT company focusing on human resources. CDC's Energy Management Division, was one of its most successful business units, providing control systems solutions that managed as much as 25% of all electricity on the planet, and went to Ceridian in the split. This division was renamed Empros and was sold to Siemens in 1993.[42][43] In 1997, General Dynamics acquired the Computing Devices International Division of Ceridian, which was a defense electronics and systems integration business headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota – originally Control Data's Government Systems Division.

In March 2001, Ceridian separated into two independent companies, with the old Ceridian Corporation renamed itself to Arbitron Inc. and the rest of the company (consisting of human resources services and Comdata business) took the Ceridian Corporation name.[44] Ceridian was later split again in 2013, with formation of Ceridian HCM Holding Inc. (human resources services) and Comdata Inc. (payments business), marking the end of CDC assets split for good.[45]

Timeline of systems releases

[edit]

Note: The 8xx & 9xx Cyber models, introduced beginning in 1982, formed the 64-bit Cyber 180 series, and their Peripheral Processors (PPs) were 16-bit. The 180 series had virtual memory capability, using CDC's NOS/VE operating system.[46]
The more complete nomenclature for these was 180/xxx, although at times the shorter form (e.g. Cyber 990) was used.

Peripheral Systems Group

[edit]

Control Data Corporation's Peripheral Systems Group was both a hardware and a software development unit that functioned in the 1970s[47][48][49] and 1980s.[50]

Their services including development and marketing of IBM-oriented (operating) systems software.[50] One of the Peripheral Systems Group's software products was named CUPID, "Control Data's Program for Unlike Data Set Concatenation."[51] Its focus was for customers of IBM's MVS operating system, and the intended audience was systems programmers. The product's General Information and Reference Manual included SysGen-like options and information about internal user-accessible control blocks.[52]

Film and science fiction references

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References

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Further reading

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Control Data Corporation

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from Grokipedia
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was an American computer and data processing company founded in 1957 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a group of engineers including William Norris, Seymour Cray, Willis Drake, and Arnold Ryden, who had left Sperry-Univac due to dissatisfaction with the company's direction. The firm quickly became a leader in the development of high-performance computing systems, particularly mainframes and supercomputers, and played a pivotal role in advancing scientific and military computing during the mid-20th century. At its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, CDC—one of the "BUNCH," the five largest non-IBM computer manufacturers—employed nearly 30,000 people and was among the top five computer firms globally, with innovations that influenced the broader technology industry. However, the company faced significant challenges in the 1980s from the rise of personal computers and financial difficulties, ultimately beginning to exit the computer hardware business in the late 1980s and splitting in 1992 into successor entities like Ceridian. The company's early success stemmed from its roots in the Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a WWII-era Navy cryptanalysis group that had been acquired by Sperry Rand in 1952, providing CDC's founders with expertise in advanced electronics. William Norris, who served as president from 1957 to 1986, led the initial fundraising effort, securing over $1.2 million by September 1957 through stock issuance and personal investments, enabling the development of its first major product. In 1960, CDC delivered the CDC 1604, its inaugural large-scale mainframe computer, under a $600,000 U.S. Navy contract signed in July 1958. This system marked CDC's entry into the commercial computing market and helped the company's stock soar from $1 per share in 1957 to $100 by 1961, fueling rapid growth and inspiring a wave of tech startups in the Twin Cities region. CDC's most notable achievements came in supercomputing, pioneered by , a founder who started at the company in 1957 and designed groundbreaking machines like the , released in 1964 and recognized as the world's fastest computer at the time. The featured innovative architecture with multiple peripheral processors and achieved clock speeds far surpassing competitors, establishing CDC as a dominant force in scientific computing for government and research institutions. Subsequent systems, including the in the early 1970s, continued this legacy, but Cray's departure in 1972 to found Cray Research highlighted internal tensions over resource allocation. Beyond hardware, CDC expanded into services with the CYBERNET network in the 1970s and emphasized through initiatives like the Control Data Institute for job training and the educational computing system. By the 1980s, CDC grappled with a and market shifts toward affordable personal computers, leading to heavy losses and a strategic pivot away from . In , the company restructured under new leadership, and culminating in 1992, it split into Control Data Systems, Inc., and Ceridian, with the former's computer operations ultimately failing to thrive. The original CDC entity dissolved by 1999, but its legacy endures through spin-offs such as (founded by ex-CDC executives in 1979) and Ceridian (a and HR services firm), which trace their origins to CDC's diversification efforts. Overall, Control Data Corporation's contributions to supercomputing and early shaped the evolution of modern , even as its struggled to adapt to industry changes.

Founding and Early Development

Background and Founding (1940s–1957)

The origins of Control Data Corporation trace back to the technological advancements spurred by , particularly in the field of and early . During the war, the U.S. Navy's code-breaking efforts relied on innovative electronic machines developed by groups like the Communication Supplementary Activity (CSA) in After the war, key figures such as William C. Norris, who had served in the Navy's cryptologic efforts, transitioned to private enterprise. In January 1946, Norris co-founded Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a startup backed by former Navy officers and engineers to commercialize wartime computing technologies initially for cryptographic applications. ERA quickly expanded into building digital computers for military clients, hiring talented engineers including , who joined part-time in 1950 while completing his degree at the . Cray, a WWII veteran who served as a radio operator and later worked on radar-jamming equipment in the , contributed to ERA's early projects on high-speed data processing systems derived from code-breaking machines. By the early 1950s, faced financial pressures from high development costs and sought capital for growth, leading to its acquisition by in 1952 for approximately $1.7 million. This merger integrated into 's division, where Norris rose to become general manager, overseeing the production of commercial computers like the . However, the transition to a commercial entity was challenging; 's focus on office equipment diluted resources for computing, allowing to dominate the market with aggressive pricing and broader product lines, such as the scientific computer introduced in 1953. struggled with internal bureaucracy and insufficient investment in research, limiting its ability to compete effectively against 's expanding ecosystem. Frustrated by mismanagement and the lack of strategic commitment to advanced computing at Sperry Rand (formed by the 1955 merger of and ), Norris resigned in July 1957 along with about a dozen key engineers, including . They established Control Data Corporation (CDC) in , , with initial capitalization of $600,000 raised through the sale of 600,000 shares of stock at $1 each. The founding team, comprising 12 engineers pooling their expertise and resources, aimed to prioritize for defense and scientific applications, shifting from vacuum-tube limitations to emerging technology for greater reliability and speed. This focus on military contracts provided early stability, enabling CDC to differentiate itself in a market overshadowed by IBM's commercial dominance.

Early Computer Designs and Seymour Cray's Vision

Upon its founding in 1957, Control Data Corporation (CDC) quickly turned to innovative engineering under the leadership of , who joined as chief designer and focused on transistor-based systems to surpass vacuum-tube limitations. In 1958, Cray developed the "Little Character," a compact 6-bit prototype that served as a proof-of-concept for modular logic and packaging techniques aimed at enhancing reliability and computational speed in larger machines. This experimental device utilized a limited set of standardized transistorized circuit boards, allowing for scalable assembly and testing of core logic functions, which demonstrated the feasibility of building high-performance computers without the fragility of earlier tube-based designs. Cray's vision, articulated shortly after CDC's inception, outlined an ambitious roadmap for a scalable family of computers ranging from low-end systems to advanced supercomputers, incorporating early concepts for peripheral processors to offload input/output tasks and foundational ideas toward vector processing for scientific workloads. This "big plan" emphasized modularity to enable rapid development across product lines, drawing on Cray's prior experience with military computing to prioritize speed and efficiency in data handling. By integrating these principles, Cray aimed to position CDC as a leader in scientific computing, anticipating the need for machines that could handle complex simulations beyond general-purpose applications. The plan's initial validation came through CDC's first major contract in 1958 with the U.S. Navy, which commissioned the CDC 160 as an controller but prompted a redesign into the more capable featuring a 48-bit word architecture and for improved storage density and access times. This contract, secured amid CDC's nascent operations, marked the company's entry into military-grade computing and leveraged germanium transistors—the first widespread shift from vacuum tubes in commercial systems—delivering the in 1960. Despite these advances, CDC faced significant hurdles in the late , including limited funding that constrained prototyping and scaling efforts, as the company operated with resources inherited from undercapitalized predecessors like Engineering Research Associates. Intense competition from IBM's 7090, released in 1959 and optimized for scientific and real-time applications, pressured CDC to differentiate through superior speed and . Internally, debates arose over whether to prioritize niche supercomputing pursuits under or pursue broader general-purpose machines to ensure financial stability, reflecting the tension between visionary innovation and market realities.

Core Computing Products

CDC 1600 Series and Initial Market Entry

The CDC 160 and 160-A, introduced in 1960 as Control Data Corporation's (CDC) first commercial minicomputers, featured a 12-bit word architecture and supported up to 32,768 words of with a 6.4-microsecond cycle time. These desk-sized systems, priced at approximately $60,000, were designed for real-time control applications, , and off-line processing in environments requiring compact, reliable hardware. They found early adoption in and industrial settings, including sales to the U.S. Navy for tasks such as and peripheral control. The 160-A's solid-state design emphasized low power consumption and high reliability, positioning it as an affordable alternative for dedicated production control, such as in and . Building on this foundation, the , released in 1960 and designed by , represented CDC's entry into higher-performance with a 48-bit architecture, indirect addressing, and expandable memory up to 32,000 words. Priced at around $1 million—significantly less than competitors like the 7090—this transistor-based system delivered superior speed for its era, executing operations at rates competitive with larger machines. Approximately 50 units were sold, primarily to government agencies and research institutions, including an initial $2.5 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense that delivered the first system to the Postgraduate School in . Its modular design and focus on scientific and real-time applications helped establish CDC's reputation for innovative, cost-effective hardware in defense-related . The CDC 3600, announced in 1963 as part of the 3000 series, shifted toward scientific computing with a 48-bit word length, up to 32,768 words of core memory, and a clock speed enabling about 1 million instructions per second. It included native support for FORTRAN compilers, facilitating complex simulations and data analysis in academic and laboratory environments. Targeted at universities and research labs, installations included the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), where it served as a primary tool for scientific workloads from 1963 onward. CDC's market strategy in the early 1960s emphasized undercutting on price-to-performance ratios while securing defense contracts to build credibility and revenue. By offering systems like the 160-A at $60,000 compared to 's $85,000 , and the at a fraction of the cost of equivalent models, CDC captured segments in government, military, and research markets previously dominated by larger incumbents. Key wins, such as and DoD procurements, underscored the company's focus on reliability and scalability, fostering a reputation for delivering robust solutions that aligned with Cray's foundational 1957 vision for accessible high-speed computing. This approach enabled CDC to sell dozens of 1600-series units by the mid-1960s, laying the groundwork for broader market penetration.

CDC 6600: Pioneering Supercomputing

The , released in 1964, featured a 60-bit with a central processor operating at a 10 MHz clock speed and up to 131,072 words of core memory organized into 32 interleaved banks for a 1 μs access time. This design delivered approximately 3 million (3 MIPS), making it roughly three times faster than the 7094 on typical workloads. To handle operations without burdening the central processor, the system incorporated 10 peripheral processors (PPUs), each with 4,096 words of 12-bit memory and capable of independent task execution in a time-shared "barrel" configuration. Seymour Cray initiated the design phase in 1960, drawing from earlier CDC systems like the 1600 series to prioritize high-speed scientific computing, but faced funding challenges that delayed progress until Control Data Corporation established a dedicated laboratory near , in 1962. The first was delivered in 1964 to , with the receiving its system in late December 1965. Key innovations included Freon-based cooling the logic modules to 60°F via cold bars, enabling dense packaging in eight cabinets while dissipating over 150 kW of heat. The central processor employed a hardwired without to maximize execution speed, supported by 24 registers—eight 60-bit registers, eight 18-bit index registers, and eight 18-bit address registers—for efficient data manipulation across 10 parallel functional units like floating-point add, multiply, and divide. Instruction scheduling relied on a "scoreboard" mechanism to dynamically track resource availability, resolve dependencies, and issue up to one instruction per minor cycle (100 ns), allowing sustained overlap of operations without branch prediction or . In the market, Control Data sold approximately 100 CDC 6600 units by 1969 at around $8 million each, capturing dominance in scientific research and defense applications at institutions like , , and the . This success established the CDC 6600 as the world's fastest computer from its debut until 1969, when benchmarks were surpassed by subsequent designs, fundamentally advancing supercomputing for complex simulations in physics, , and nuclear research.

CDC 7600, 8600, and Subsequent Innovations

The , released in 1969 as a successor to the , featured scalar architectural enhancements including simplified instruction issue logic capable of handling one instruction per clock cycle and a 27-nanosecond clock speed, achieving performance just over 10 million (MIPS). Designed by , it employed high-speed discrete transistors across eight-board modules and maintained compatibility with the 6600's instruction set while introducing a unified for in-order execution. These upgrades positioned the 7600 as approximately five times faster than its predecessor in overall throughput, particularly for floating-point operations. Development of the 7600 faced significant delays due to challenges in system packaging and cooling, stemming from its dense that generated substantial heat; early installations required innovative solutions like Freon-based to mitigate intermittent faults from ground loops and thermal instability. Despite these issues, Control Data Corporation sold around 75 units by the late 1970s, establishing it as the world's fastest computer from 1969 to 1975 and sustaining CDC's dominance in supercomputing for scientific and research applications at sites like the and . In 1974, CDC introduced the Network Operating System (NOS) version 1 for its 6000 and 7000 series computers, including the 7600, providing capabilities and support for environments that allowed multiple central processing units to share peripherals and resources efficiently. NOS enhanced system reliability and user accessibility through features like job queuing and management, evolving from earlier systems like SCOPE and KRONOS to address growing demands for networked, multi-user operations in large-scale computing.) The CDC 8600 project, initiated in the late with a target of 10 MIPS through four tightly coupled scalar processors in a compact clocked at 8 nanoseconds, aimed to extend the 7600's but encountered insurmountable technical complexities in module design and interconnects, alongside escalating costs amid CDC's financial strains. Only prototypes were built by , leading to cancellation before production; this failure contributed to Seymour Cray's departure from CDC that year to found Cray Research, which introduced vector-based innovations that intensified competition and eroded CDC's supercomputing lead by the mid-1970s.

CDC STAR and Cyber Series

The CDC STAR-100, introduced in 1974, marked Control Data Corporation's entry into commercial vector supercomputing, building briefly on vector processing concepts prototyped in the earlier CDC 8600 design. Designed as a memory-to-memory vector processor, it aimed to deliver high throughput for scientific workloads by processing long vectors in pipelines. The system achieved a peak vector performance of 100 MFLOPS using 64-bit , supported by up to 524,288 words of core memory and a memory bandwidth of 200 million 64-bit words per second for sequential accesses. However, its scalar processing unit operated at significantly lower speeds—comparable to earlier CDC 6600 levels—creating bottlenecks for non-vectorizable code and limiting overall efficiency per . This weakness contributed to modest adoption, with only three units delivered, to sites including and . In the mid-1970s, CDC shifted focus toward the Cyber series to address broader market needs beyond elite supercomputing, introducing mid-range systems suited for business, scientific, and applications. The lineup encompassed the Cyber 70/170 series (32-bit compatible with CDC 6000 software), Cyber 180/190 series (64-bit virtual addressing), and Cyber 200 series, offering scalable configurations from desktop to mainframe scales with integrated I/O and options. These systems emphasized reliability for commercial use, supporting workloads like and engineering simulations while maintaining compatibility with prior CDC peripherals. The Cyber 205, launched in 1981, represented a direct evolution of the STAR-100's vector architecture, incorporating dual pipelines for up to 400 MFLOPS peak in 64-bit mode, improved scalar performance (roughly seven times faster than the STAR-100), and linked triads for chained operations to reduce startup overhead. Supporting the Cyber series were advanced operating systems, including NOS () for the 170 models and NOS/VE () for the 180/200 lines, which introduced demand-paged , multiprogramming, and network to enhance resource utilization and connectivity in multi-user environments. NOS/VE, in particular, leveraged the 64-bit addressing of Cyber 180/200 processors to manage large address spaces up to 4 million words, facilitating and with minimal overhead. Amid waning demand for pure supercomputers in the late , CDC adapted the Cyber line for commercial sectors such as banking and , where its balanced scalar-vector capabilities and software proved attractive; the series saw widespread adoption through the .

Peripherals and Hardware Divisions

Peripherals Business Growth

Control Data Corporation entered the peripherals market in the early 1960s, initially focusing on systems to support its emerging mainframe lineup, including compatibility with the introduced in 1964. These tape drives provided reliable sequential storage and operations essential for scientific and applications, helping to address the high throughput needs of early supercomputing environments. By 1965, CDC expanded into with early systems such as the Model 853 disk drive for the CDC 3200 series, offering random-access capabilities that significantly improved speeds over tape-based systems. This entry positioned CDC as a key player in storage peripherals, with products designed to integrate seamlessly with its core computing hardware. During the , the peripherals division experienced rapid growth, driven by innovations such as head-per-track disk designs and removable disk packs, which enhanced storage density, accessibility, and user flexibility for large-scale data handling. By 1970, peripherals accounted for approximately 30 percent of the firm's computing revenues, underscoring their role in diversifying income streams beyond mainframe sales. To counter IBM's unbundling of software, services, and peripherals amid antitrust scrutiny, CDC pursued an integration strategy, bundling its disk drives and tape systems with mainframes to deliver cost-effective, complete solutions that maintained competitive pricing and performance advantages. Key advancements included the CDC 9760 Storage Module Drive launched in , which introduced non-IBM compatible removable disk packs with advanced head technology for higher reliability and capacity in storage, alongside high-capacity tape systems optimized for the intensive I/O requirements of supercomputers like the CDC 7600. These developments solidified CDC's peripherals as a critical complement to its products, supporting overall business expansion through the decade.

Magnetic Peripherals Inc. (MPI)

In 1975, Control Data Corporation (CDC) and formed Magnetic Peripherals Inc. (MPI) as a to consolidate and expand their (HDD) manufacturing operations, with CDC holding a 70% stake and Honeywell 30%. Headquartered in , , MPI focused on producing high-capacity disk drives for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and mainframe systems, leveraging CDC's expertise in peripherals developed since the . By 1980, MPI's SMD (Storage Module Device) interface drives, including the 9430 and 9440 series, had become key products, enabling reliable data transfer rates up to 3 MB/s and capacities exceeding 300 MB per drive. These drives were widely adopted in and mainframe environments, contributing to CDC's peripherals division surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue that year and establishing MPI as the world's largest OEM disk drive supplier. MPI drove significant innovations in HDD technology during the early , particularly in thin-film inductive heads, which offered higher signal-to-noise ratios and greater areal densities compared to traditional ferrite heads. This technology allowed for more efficient manufacturing and supported the transition to higher-performance drives, positioning MPI as a market leader by with a substantial share of the rigid disk market. Intensifying competition from Japanese firms such as Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Hitachi eroded MPI's margins through aggressive pricing and rapid capacity improvements, leading to operating losses despite peak revenues of $1.27 billion in 1985. By 1987, revenues had declined to $0.97 billion amid a broader shift away from mainframe peripherals toward smaller, PC-oriented storage. In 1987, CDC acquired minority interests from Honeywell Bull, Bull Systems, and Unisys, raising its ownership in MPI to 90%. The following year, in 1988, CDC spun off its entire data storage operations—including MPI and related facilities—into an independent subsidiary named Imprimis Technology, valued at around $1.2 billion in projected 1988 revenues. Imprimis was acquired by Seagate Technology in 1989 for $450 million, integrating MPI's legacy products and expertise into Seagate's portfolio. This divestiture freed CDC from the capital-intensive disk drive sector, allowing reallocation of resources to and services, though it highlighted the vulnerabilities of the mainframe peripherals market to technological disruption and global competition.

Peripheral Systems Group Operations

The Peripheral Systems Group of Control Data Corporation (CDC) managed the development and production of a range of peripheral hardware beyond , with a significant emphasis on systems starting in the early . The group's tape division introduced the 606 Magnetic Tape Unit in 1961, an early high-speed device capable of reading and recording on 1/2-inch tape, which was sold in large volumes to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as NCR. By the mid-1960s, as industry standards evolved, CDC shifted focus to formats compatible with systems like the , incorporating these into its own product lines such as the CDC 3000 series with the 609 and Cyber systems with the 679 unit, supporting densities up to 6250 bits per inch (bpi) and transfer rates of 200 inches per second. These became essential for archival and transfer in mainframe environments, with the group also developing streamer systems designed specifically for efficient backups, enabling continuous streaming without frequent stops to prevent tape wear. In addition to tapes, the Peripheral Systems Group produced printers and controllers that integrated seamlessly with CDC's Cyber series mainframes. Printer development began with a 1964 joint venture with Holley Carburetor Company in Rochester, Michigan, yielding line printers like the 166 model that supported high-volume output for scientific and commercial applications. Controllers, such as the 7021 Magnetic Tape Controller, facilitated connectivity for up to eight tape drives per channel, using peripheral processors to handle I/O operations independently from the central CPU, thereby enhancing overall system efficiency in Cyber installations. These products were supplied to a broad ecosystem, including nearly 1,000 OEMs like Honeywell and Wang, generating steady revenue streams; by 1980, the group achieved $1 billion in sales, up 480% from $200 million in 1975, providing a critical buffer against fluctuations in CDC's core mainframe business. During the 1980s, as the peripherals market commoditized amid intense competition from lower-cost Asian manufacturers, the group adapted through production—such as offshore manufacturing for certain components—and deepened partnerships with OEMs, securing over $500 million in orders by 1979 that continued into the decade. Efforts shifted toward higher-density tape solutions, including cartridge-based systems for improved reliability in backup operations, though these faced challenges from emerging technologies like . Despite these adaptations, revenues began declining, projected to drop by a third to about $1 billion by 1986, reflecting broader industry pressures. The group's contributions helped offset division losses during CDC's decline, but it was ultimately divested as part of the company's restructuring in the late 1980s. The Peripheral Systems Group also benefited from synergies with disk operations prior to the spin-off of Magnetic Peripherals Inc.

Education and Workforce Initiatives

Control Data Institute Establishment

In 1965, Control Data Corporation (CDC), under the leadership of its founder and CEO William C. Norris, established the Control Data Institute (CDI) as a dedicated to vocational training in . The institute began operations in , , reflecting Norris's broader philosophy of , which sought to bridge the growing skills gap in the computing by providing accessible to both CDC employees and the general public. The curriculum emphasized practical, hands-on instruction tailored to industry needs, including courses in and using CDC hardware. Key offerings covered languages such as and , enabling students to gain proficiency in and through direct interaction with company systems. This approach aligned with CDC's early growth in the , as the institute supported the company's expansion by preparing technicians and programmers for its burgeoning and peripherals markets. By 1970, CDI had expanded to more than 20 sites across the , with further growth to 69 learning centers worldwide by the late 1970s, including locations in , , and . The institute's programs enrolled over 8,000 students annually in the mid-1970s. This scale underscored CDI's role in democratizing access to skills amid the rapid of the industry.

Training Programs and Educational Impact

In the 1970s, Control Data Corporation expanded its training programs through partnerships with liberal arts colleges to deliver programming courses, aiming to broaden access to computer and address the growing demand for skilled personnel in the industry. These collaborations focused on entry-level vocational via the Control Data Institutes (CDI), which by then operated multiple locations across the and internationally, building on the institutes' initial establishment in the mid-1960s to train computer technicians and programmers for CDC's operations and customers. The expansion emphasized practical skills in areas like programming and systems operation, aligning with CDC's corporate social responsibility initiatives to foster workforce development. A key aspect of this growth involved targeted outreach to women and underrepresented minorities, reflecting broader efforts amid the industry's talent shortages. In 1969, CDI hosted a "Happen-In for Women" event to recruit female participants into programming courses, where women comprised about 20% of enrollees by 1968-1969. By 1971, CDC implemented an policy that promoted aggressive recruitment and advertising directed at women, alongside training seminars for executives in 1975 to support inclusive hiring and placement. These programs sought to diversify the programming workforce, which was increasingly critical as demand for skilled labor outpaced supply, helping to produce generations of trained professionals who contributed to the early sector. CDC also integrated into its initiatives, notably through the commercialization of the system in the 1970s, which provided computer-based instruction and networked learning environments for vocational and academic training. This effort extended to partnerships with educational institutions; in 1983, CDC announced a program to deploy computers for pre-engineering at 110 colleges, enhancing curriculum in technical fields and further amplifying the institutes' reach. Such innovations supported PL/I language instruction within CDC's training ecosystem, as the language was integral to their Cyber series systems used in educational settings, promoting its adoption among trainees for and scientific computing applications. The long-term impact of these programs was significant in mitigating industry-wide programmer shortages during the 1970s and early 1980s, with CDI graduates filling roles in CDC's operations and beyond, thereby building a foundational talent pool for the profession. However, as CDC faced financial challenges and market shifts in the mid-1980s—including substantial losses from discontinued operations—the training initiatives scaled back, with the institutes winding down by the late 1980s. By the late 1980s, as part of CDC's restructuring, the CDI network was disbanded, with many locations closing; however, its programs had trained tens of thousands, contributing significantly to early workforce diversity and skills.

Business Diversification and Investments

Financial Sector Investments: Commercial Credit

In 1968, Control Data Corporation (CDC) acquired Commercial Credit Corporation, a major consumer finance company based in , , in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at $582 million to provide a stable revenue stream amid the volatility of the computer industry. The acquisition was part of founder William C. Norris's diversification strategy, which aimed to balance CDC's high-risk technology operations with more predictable , as the company's revenues were subject to cyclical demand and intense competition. At the time, Commercial Credit had assets exceeding $3 billion and operated nationwide, focusing on installment loans for automobiles, appliances, and other consumer goods. Following the merger, Commercial Credit was integrated as a key under Norris's , aligning with CDC's broader emphasis on socially responsible practices by expanding access to for underserved consumers through auto loans, cards, and personal financing. The unit grew steadily during the and early , leveraging CDC's technological expertise for in loan management and , which helped scale operations. By 1985, Commercial Credit's assets had reached approximately $6.4 billion, driven primarily by its core es in vehicle financing and products, contributing significantly to CDC's overall earnings stability. Despite this growth, Commercial Credit faced mounting challenges in the mid-1980s, including high levels from aggressive expansion and increased regulatory over lending practices amid rising rates and economic pressures. These issues were exacerbated by CDC's broader financial strains, as the parent company issued high-yield "junk" bonds to fund operations, leading to a downgrade and contributing to a $562.7 million net loss in 1985. Commercial Credit itself reported losses in late 1985, partly due to provisions for loan losses in a softening , which intensified pressures on CDC. To address these difficulties and raise liquidity, CDC initiated a spin-off of Commercial Credit in September 1986, taking the public through an of 80% of its shares at $21 to $24 per share, generating approximately $850 million in proceeds while retaining a 20% stake. This transaction provided critical capital for CDC's restructuring efforts but marked a retreat from diversification, as the company shifted focus back to core computing amid ongoing losses. In 1987, CDC sold its remaining 18.3% interest for $33 per share, totaling about $314 million, fully divesting the unit.

Entertainment and Ticketing Ventures: Ticketron

In 1969, Control Data Corporation acquired , originally known as Ticket Reservation Service (TRS), establishing it as a to leverage CDC's computing expertise in the emerging field of automated ticketing. This move positioned as one of the earliest computerized systems for event reservations, initially developed in collaboration with CDC hardware to handle theater, sports, and entertainment tickets across major U.S. cities. Ticketron's technology relied heavily on CDC mainframes, starting with a 1967 pilot using the CDC 160A computer for demonstration and evolving to the CDC 1700 series by 1968 for full operations, enabling real-time processing without a traditional operating system. These systems supported remote terminals for instant reservations and ticket printing, pioneering pre-internet "" booking through and outlet-based access, with capabilities to process up to 50,000 tickets per hour across centralized facilities in New York, , and . By handling millions of tickets annually for high-profile events, Ticketron demonstrated the application of CDC's computing power to , reducing manual errors and enabling nationwide . During the 1970s and 1980s, Ticketron experienced significant growth, expanding from around 100 terminals in its early years to over 1,300 outlets by 1984, including retail locations and box offices in 22 states and . This network facilitated the sale of millions of tickets yearly, with total ticket values reaching $450 million in 1988 alone, generating substantial revenue for CDC—approximately $45 million in 1989 from service fees—making it a key non-computing amid parallels to CDC's financial diversification efforts like Commercial Credit. Facing corporate challenges and a strategic refocus on core operations, CDC sold in to a group of investors led by Washington Redskins owner for $16 million, marking the end of its involvement in the ticketing venture. This divestiture aligned with CDC's broader efforts to streamline assets during a period of financial losses and industry shifts.

Other Diversification Strategies

Under the leadership of founder and CEO William C. Norris, Control Data Corporation (CDC) pursued diversification strategies in the as a means to mitigate risks from IBM's market dominance in mainframes and the cyclical nature of the industry. These efforts aimed to stabilize streams by venturing into non-core areas, leveraging CDC's technological expertise to address broader societal and economic challenges while generating new income sources. Non-computing revenues, including services and social initiatives, grew to represent a significant portion of the company's total by the mid-1980s, reflecting the success of this hedging approach. A key pillar of CDC's diversification was its commitment to social responsibility, particularly through environmental and community-focused initiatives launched in the 1970s. Norris championed "cybernetic systems" that integrated business with societal improvement, including programs to create jobs in underserved urban areas. CDC established manufacturing plants in economically depressed inner-city locations, such as North Minneapolis (opened in 1968), St. Paul’s Selby district, Washington D.C., and San Antonio, employing hundreds from minority and low-income communities to assemble peripherals and perform data entry tasks. These facilities not only addressed urban unemployment but also proved profitable, with the Northside plant achieving high productivity levels without reported issues like vandalism. Complementing these efforts, the Fair Break program utilized CDC's PLATO computer-based education system to provide remedial training and paid work ($4 per hour) to at-risk youth aged 16-22, training dozens at dedicated centers and offering scalable kits to other organizations for revenue. While specific pollution control technologies were not a primary focus, these initiatives aligned with broader environmental and social goals by promoting sustainable community development through technology. CDC also expanded into software and services to diversify beyond hardware sales, beginning with in the 1960s. The company developed CYBERNET, a nationwide network using wideband and telephone lines to enable remote access to its mainframes, allowing customers to rent time affordably and reducing the need for full system purchases. This service grew through acquisitions, including C-E-I-R Inc. in 1967, which bolstered software capabilities. In the 1970s, CDC further strengthened its bureaus by acquiring IBM's Service Bureau Corporation in 1973 as part of an antitrust settlement, establishing dozens of centers worldwide for outsourced tasks like and . These bureaus positioned CDC among the top five computer services providers, contributing steady revenue amid hardware market fluctuations. Internationally, CDC sought to broaden its market reach by establishing subsidiaries in and during the and , focusing on localized sales and maintenance of its systems. Early efforts included installing a CDC 1604-A computer at Hannover Technical Institute in in 1964 and expanding CYBERNET services abroad. However, these ventures faced challenges, including intense competition from local firms and regulatory hurdles, resulting in limited overall success and modest contributions to global revenue. By the late , European operations provided some diversification, but Asian expansions remained underdeveloped compared to domestic efforts.

Decline, Spin-offs, and Legacy

ETA Systems Formation and Challenges

In 1983, Control Data Corporation (CDC) spun off its development efforts into Systems, Inc., a wholly owned designed to operate with greater autonomy and bypass internal bureaucratic constraints. The new entity was formed primarily from 127 engineers and staff transferred from CDC's CYBER 205 research and applications group, aiming to recapture market share in through innovative hardware designs. CDC provided substantial initial funding to support the venture, allowing ETA to focus on developing next-generation vector supercomputers. ETA's flagship product, the , was a vector introduced in 1987, featuring logic and optional cryogenic cooling to enhance performance and efficiency. The system achieved a peak performance of up to 10 gigaflops (GFLOPS), positioning it as a competitive alternative in the supercomputer market with configurations scalable from single to eight processors. However, development faced significant delays and exceeded budgets, compounded by technical challenges including high power consumption, complex packaging for cooling systems, and reliability issues in the dense circuitry. The encountered stiff market competition from established players like Cray Research and IBM, which dominated the supercomputer sector with more mature offerings and broader customer bases. Despite its innovative features, the system suffered from software malfunctions and lower-than-expected demand, resulting in only about 34 installations worldwide. CDC continued to fund ETA at an average of $50 million annually from 1984 onward but distanced itself from direct operational risks through the subsidiary structure; by 1988, ETA reported $100 million in losses, contributing to CDC's broader financial pressures. In April 1989, CDC abruptly shut down ETA due to ongoing cash shortages and unprofitability, laying off approximately 3,100 employees and absorbing minimal remnants into its core operations.

Corporate Wind-Down and Asset Sales

By the mid-1980s, Control Data Corporation (CDC) encountered a severe , exacerbated by heavy losses from unprofitable diversification investments and a sharp decline in the market. In 1985, the company reported a record net loss of $562.7 million on revenues of approximately $3.7 billion, stemming from write-downs on discontinued operations, a shrinking peripherals that fell from 55% in 1980 to under 20% by 1985, and broader challenges in adapting to evolving demands for equipment. This downturn led to a technical default on short-term loans totaling $383 million and prompted initial efforts, including the consolidation of facilities and attempts to divest non-core assets like the Commercial Credit unit, though that sale was ultimately abandoned. Restructuring intensified in 1986, marked by the ouster—framed as retirement—of founder and longtime CEO William C. Norris after 29 years, amid mounting losses exceeding $400 million for the full year and pressure from lenders. Under new leadership, CDC executed a major debt restructuring, separating its core computer operations in from the Baltimore-based Commercial Credit subsidiary to isolate financial risks, while pursuing piecemeal asset sales and workforce reductions. The company laid off thousands across multiple waves, reducing its global workforce from about 60,000 in 1984 to roughly 17,000 by 1989, representing a contraction of over 70%; notable cuts included a 1989 of 3,100 employees tied to the closure of its supercomputer division, ETA Systems, which incurred $100 million in annual operating losses. Partial divestitures followed, such as the 1989 sale of its Imprimis Technology storage peripherals unit—encompassing disk drives and related products—to for $450 million, including $250 million in cash, 10.7 million Seagate shares, and a $50 million , allowing CDC to retain an 18% stake in Seagate and bolster its against Japanese competition in . The wind-down culminated in 1992 with CDC's effective dissolution through a corporate split into two independent entities: Control Data Systems Inc., focusing on remaining and integration services, and Ceridian Corporation, encompassing information services like payroll processing, , and the Arbitron media measurement business. This separation involved $400 million in charges and marked the end of CDC as an integrated entity, following years of unprofitability since and the sale or closure of nearly 20 business units, including the ETA divestiture as one key exit. In the aftermath, thousands of employees were absorbed into acquiring firms like Seagate, while CDC's —spanning mainframe designs, storage technologies, and software—was dispersed across buyers, contributing to advancements in services and industries.

Timeline of Major System Releases

The timeline of major system releases by Control Data Corporation (CDC) chronicles the evolution of its computing hardware from early transistor-based machines to advanced vector supercomputers, primarily focused on scientific and high-performance applications. Key milestones reflect innovations in architecture, often involving engineer until his departure in 1972, with systems targeting government, research, and industrial users such as national laboratories and agencies like .
  • 1960: CDC 1604 – CDC's first commercial computer, a 48-bit transistorized system capable of 225,000 , marking the company's entry into solid-state computing; it featured up to 32,768 words and was adopted by the U.S. Navy for real-time applications like process control. Designed by , it was the world's fastest computer at launch and set the stage for CDC's supercomputing focus.
  • 1961: CDC 160A – A compact, desk-sized derivative of the with 12-bit words and up to 4,096 words of core memory, priced around $100,000; it supported scientific and control tasks, competing with early minicomputers, and was used in production environments like manufacturing automation. This model expanded CDC's reach into smaller-scale installations.
  • 1964: CDC 6600 – The first true , a 60-bit with 400,000 using ten peripheral processors for I/O, achieving up to 3 million floating-point operations per second; delivered to sites like , it outperformed competitors like IBM's Stretch and established CDC's dominance in high-end under Cray's .
  • 1969: CDC 7600 – Successor to the 6600, featuring four central processors with scalar and vector capabilities, delivering 36 million —five to ten times faster than its predecessor; installed at facilities like for nuclear simulations, it represented CDC's push into multiprocessor architectures but faced delays in development.
  • 1974: CDC STAR-100 (Cyber 203) – CDC's first , with 64-bit architecture and up to 100 million floating-point operations per second in vector mode, including 64 kilobytes of ; announced in 1971 with an initial order from , it targeted scientific workloads but underperformed in scalar tasks compared to expectations.
  • 1974: Cyber 170 Series – A family of 60-bit systems (models 170/172 to 175) compatible with the 6600/7600 line, offering up to 4.5 million per processor with integrated circuits for improved reliability; deliveries began in 1975 to research institutions, bridging CDC's classic architectures toward more modular designs.
  • 1981: Cyber 205 – An enhanced vector supercomputer evolving from the STAR-100, with dual pipelines achieving up to 400 million floating-point operations per second and 1 megabyte of memory; the first unit was delivered to the UK Meteorological Office, serving weather modeling and aerospace simulations at sites like NASA, though it struggled against emerging Cray competitors.
Following CDC's challenges in the mid-1980s, the ETA-10 supercomputer—a 1987 release from the CDC-spun-off ETA Systems—extended vector processing with liquid nitrogen-cooled models reaching 10 billion floating-point operations per second, but it operated independently of CDC's core product line.

Cultural References in Film and Science Fiction

Control Data Corporation (CDC) computers frequently appeared as props in mid-20th-century films, symbolizing advanced technology during the era of mainframe dominance. In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, directed by and based on D. F. Jones's novel, CDC provided approximately $4.8 million worth of computer equipment, including consoles and peripherals, to depict the titular supercomputer systems Colossus and Guardian. This donation served as an early form of , lending authenticity to the film's portrayal of sentient defense computers linking to enforce global peace through surveillance and control. CDC hardware also featured in other cinematic depictions of futuristic or high-tech environments. The 1973 dystopian film , starring , includes a CDC 6600 in the background of scenes set in a resource-scarce future, underscoring the role of computing in societal management. Similarly, in the 1973 crime drama The Mad Bomber, a CDC 3100 mainframe is used by law enforcement to analyze criminal patterns, reflecting real-world applications of CDC systems in . By the , CDC's Cyber series appeared in action films; in (1988), a CDC Cyber 180/830A is prominently displayed in the Nakatomi Plaza computer room, amid the hijacking plot, highlighting the era's reliance on large-scale mainframes for corporate operations. In science fiction literature, CDC's influence is more indirect, often embodied in portrayals of powerful computing entities inspired by the company's pioneering supercomputers like the , which represented cutting-edge performance in the 1960s. The 1966 novel Colossus by D. F. Jones describes interconnected supercomputers exerting authoritarian control, echoing the scale and interconnectedness of CDC systems, though the book predates the film's use of actual CDC hardware. Such narratives drew from the growing cultural perception of computers as omnipotent tools, with CDC's innovations contributing to the archetype of the all-seeing machine in works exploring themes of technological overreach. Documentaries on computing history have preserved CDC's legacy by showcasing its role in the industry's evolution. The 1992 PBS series The Machine That Changed the World, a five-part production by WGBH Boston and the , includes interviews and footage referencing CDC's as a landmark in supercomputing, illustrating its impact on scientific and military applications during the era. This series, drawing on archival material, positions CDC alongside pioneers like in transforming society through digital technology. CDC's cultural footprint endures as an emblem of – , inspiring fictional supercomputers that blend awe with cautionary tales of and control. Its real-world feats, such as the CDC 6600's status as the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, fueled media depictions of machines capable of reshaping human affairs, from defense simulations to dystopian governance.

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