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74-588: The machine was the size and shape of a refrigerator, about four feet high (roughly 1.20 meters), with a hinged lid for access. Shortly after completing the prototype design, Cray left to join Control Data Corporation . When the Navy awarded Sperry Rand a US$ 50 million contract to build the AN/USQ-17, Univac engineers redesigned the entire machine from scratch using silicon transistors. They retained

148-644: 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

222-487: A von Neumann architecture stores program data and instruction data in the same memory, while a computer with a Harvard architecture has separate memories for storing program and data. However, the term stored-program computer is sometimes used as a synonym for the von Neumann architecture. Jack Copeland considers that it is "historically inappropriate, to refer to electronic stored-program digital computers as 'von Neumann machines'". Hennessy and Patterson wrote that

296-596: 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. A 12-bit cut-down version

370-631: 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

444-475: 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 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. Meanwhile, at the new Chippewa Falls lab, Seymour Cray, Jim Thornton, and Dean Roush put together

518-534: A home in his military glider factory. The result was Engineering Research Associates (ERA). Formed in 1946, this contract engineering company worked on a number of seemingly unrelated projects in the early 1950s. 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

592-525: 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

666-556: 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

740-593: A more compact design with refrigeration designed by Dean Roush. 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 ($ 79 million in 2023 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,

814-524: 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. After the delivery of the 6600 IBM took notice of this new company. In 1965 IBM started an effort to build

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888-425: 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

962-619: 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, 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

1036-496: 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

1110-532: A re-design was needed. 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

1184-416: A result, in 1987 it sold its PathLab Laboratory Information System to 3M . 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

1258-688: A single hardwired program. As there were no program instructions, no program storage was necessary. Other computers, though programmable, stored their programs on punched tape , which was physically fed into the system as needed, as was the case for the Zuse Z3 and the Harvard Mark I , or were only programmable by physical manipulation of switches and plugs, as was the case for the Colossus computer . In 1936, Konrad Zuse anticipated in two patent applications that machine instructions could be stored in

1332-430: 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 , followed by a series of tape drives and drum printers , all of which were designed in-house. The printer business

1406-573: 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. Eventually they found their solution: John Parker, the owner of a Chase Aircraft affiliate named Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation located in St. Paul, Minnesota ,

1480-479: 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

1554-437: A year later, he eventually won a settlement valued at $ 80 million. 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. 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

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1628-489: Is a computer that stores program instructions in electronically, electromagnetically, or optically accessible memory. This contrasts with systems that stored the program instructions with plugboards or similar mechanisms. The definition is often extended with the requirement that the treatment of programs and data in memory be interchangeable or uniform. In principle, stored-program computers have been designed with various architectural characteristics. A computer with

1702-427: 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

1776-543: The Bell System , a development that started in earnest by c. 1954 with initial concept designs by Erna Schneider Hoover at Bell Labs . The first of such systems was installed on a trial basis in Morris, Illinois in 1960. The storage medium for the program instructions was the flying-spot store , a photographic plate read by an optical scanner that had a speed of about one microsecond access time. For temporary data,

1850-457: The CDC 7600 (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

1924-767: The EDSAC in Cambridge ran its first program, making it another electronic digital stored-program computer. It is sometimes claimed that the IBM SSEC , operational in January 1948, was the first stored-program computer; this claim is controversial, not least because of the hierarchical memory system of the SSEC, and because some aspects of its operations, like access to relays or tape drives, were determined by plugging. The first stored-program computer to be built in continental Europe

1998-486: 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

2072-645: 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

2146-721: The UNIVAC 1100/2200 series , which is still in use today. 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 , the Burroughs Corporation , and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the NCR Corporation (NCR), General Electric , and Honeywell , RCA and UNIVAC . For most of

2220-464: The instruction set , so that programs developed for the original machine would still run on the new one. As part of the redesign it was decided to improve access, and the second version was designed to stand upright, like an old fashioned double-door refrigerator , about six feet tall (roughly 1.80 m). This new design was designated the AN/USQ-20 . Instructions were represented as 30-bit words, in

2294-501: 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

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2368-404: 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

2442-488: 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

2516-486: 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, 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

2590-539: 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

2664-404: The affiliated companies of CDC; in 1992, Cray established Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining affiliate companies of CDC currently do business as the software company Dayforce . During World War II the U.S. Navy had built up a classified team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery for both Japanese and German electro-mechanical ciphers . A number of these were produced by

2738-693: 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 . In 1999, Commercial Credit was renamed CitiFinancial, and in 2011, the full-service network of US CitiFinancial branches were renamed OneMain Financial . In 1969, Control Data acquired 51% of Ticketron for $ 3.9 million from Cemp Investments . In 1970, Ticketron became

2812-474: The early Harvard machines were regarded as "reactionary by the advocates of stored-program computers". The concept of the stored-program computer can be traced back to the 1936 theoretical concept of a universal Turing machine . Von Neumann was aware of this paper, and he impressed it on his collaborators. Many early computers, such as the Atanasoff–Berry computer , were not reprogrammable. They executed

2886-438: 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

2960-546: 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,

3034-426: The following format: Numbers were represented as 30-bit words , this allowed for five 6-bit alphanumeric characters per word. The main memory was 32,768 = 32 K words of core memory . The available processor registers were: The instruction format defined for the AN/USQ-17 marked the beginning of an instruction set which would be carried on, with many changes along the way, into later UNIVAC computers including

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3108-527: The founder and president of CDC, could visit Cray's laboratory without an invitation. 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 to round out CDC's peripheral lineup. In general, they tried to offer

3182-476: 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

3256-534: 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. Control Data held interests in other companies including computer research company Arbitron , Commercial Credit Corporation and Ticketron . In 1968, Commercial Credit Corporation

3330-503: 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. Despite having valuable technology, CDC still suffered huge losses in 1985 ($ 567 million ) and 1986 while attempting to reorganize. As

3404-495: 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

3478-512: 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

3552-541: 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

3626-513: 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. 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. Stored program A stored-program computer

3700-411: 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

3774-415: 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

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3848-407: The power supply rectifiers were still tubes. 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

3922-457: 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

3996-657: The same storage used for data. In 1948, the Manchester Baby , built at University of Manchester , is generally recognized as world's first electronic computer that ran a stored program—an event on 21 June 1948. However the Baby was not regarded as a full-fledged computer, but more a proof of concept predecessor to the Manchester Mark 1 computer, which was first put to research work in April 1949. On 6 May 1949

4070-534: The sole computerized ticketing provider in the United States. 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 . By the mid 1980s, Ticketron

4144-571: The split. This division was renamed Empros and was sold to Siemens in 1993. 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

4218-506: 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. In the same month it won its lawsuit against IBM, CDC announced its new computer,

4292-492: 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

4366-410: Was CDC's most profitable business with revenue of $ 120 million and CDC, which was loss-making at the time, considered selling the business. 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 . CDC decided to fight for

4440-488: 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

4514-409: 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

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4588-462: 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

4662-522: 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

4736-673: 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

4810-524: Was closely linked with MPI), and non-computer-related assets like Ticketron. 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. 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. In 1999, CDS

4884-555: 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

4958-402: Was known as Computer Peripherals, Inc. (CPI). 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

5032-617: 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

5106-444: 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

5180-410: Was most interested in ERA's magnetic drum memory systems. Rand soon merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand . 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

5254-722: 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 left Sperry to form the Control Data Corp. in September 1957, setting up shop in an old warehouse across the river from Sperry's St. Paul laboratory, in Minneapolis at 501 Park Avenue. Of

5328-625: 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. Meanwhile, several very large Japanese manufacturing firms were entering

5402-540: Was the MESM , completed in the Soviet Union in 1950. Several computers could be considered the first stored-program computer, depending on the criteria. The concept of using a stored-program computer for switching of telecommunication circuits is called stored program control (SPC). It was instrumental to the development of the first electronic switching systems by American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) in

5476-531: Was the target of a hostile takeover by Loews Inc. Loews had acquired nearly 10% of CCC, which it intended to break up on acquisition. 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." By the 1980s, Control Data entered an unstable period, which resulted in

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