Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, a group which included IBM, Burroughs Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), NCR Corporation (NCR), General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC.

For most of the 1960s, CDC's strength was the design work of the electrical engineer Seymour Cray who developed a series of some of the fastest mainframes in the world. During the 1970s, Cray left CDC to found Cray Research (CRI) to manufacture supercomputers. In 1988, after much financial loss, CDC began withdrawing from mainframes and sold several of its affiliated companies.

In 1992, CDC went out of business after dividing its assets between two new companies, Ceridian and Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining affiliate companies of CDC do business as the software company Dayforce.

Background

Communications Supplementary Activity - Washington (CSAW)

During World War II, the U.S. Navy in 1942 assembled a team of engineers called Communications Supplementary Activity - Washington (CSAW). Their mission was to use code breaking machinery developed by NCR to decipher secret Japanese and German codes. Their main targets were German U-boats using the Enigma machine. The CSAW staff included the electrical engineer Seymour Cray and the cryptographer William Norris. These two men would be key figures in the establishment and growth of CDC.

When the war ended in 1945, NCR advised the Navy that it was ceasing production of code breaking equipment. However, the Navy needed to maintain its code breaking capabilities to face the new threat from the Soviet Union.Thomas J. Misa, Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Its problem was that the Navy could not match the pay that the CSAW team members could earn in the private sector, given the reduction in government defense spending. CSAW management then proposed that the Navy support the establishment of a private company to hire CSAW staff and building its own code breaking machines.

In 1946, the Navy approached John Parker, the owner of Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation in St. Paul, Minnesota. During the war, Parker had been making gliders for the US Army. Needing new business, Parker agreed to the arrangement. Parker would hire the CSAW team and pursue any business it wanted. For its secret Navy business, the Navy sent the Naval Computing Machine Laboratory (NCML) staff and code breaking equipment to the new company.

Engineering Research Associates

Parker formed Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in 1946, at the factory in St. Paul, Minnesota, leased from the government.Parker hired 40 workers from CSAW and received the loan of 20 naval personal from NCML.

Soon after its incorporation, the Navy asked ERA to investigate the storage of binary information on rotating magnetic drums. ERA created a magnetic drum by gluing magnetic recording tape to a cylinder. However, once data was uploaded on the drum, the operator could not change it without deleting everything. In 1948, ERA solved that problem, creating the first viable memory storage device for a computing system.

The Navy's top priority for ERA was the design of a general purpose computer that could store programs. Its previous code breaking machines required new hardware whenever an enemy changed its coding system, quickly making the expensive Navy equipment obsolete. A code breaking machine that could upload a new program as needed would mitigate that problem. The introduction of ENIAC and EDVAC, the first general-purpose mainframes, pushed the Navy into creating its own machine.

The Navy in 1948 gave ERA the confirmation to build a new, general purpose code breaking machine, code-named Atlas. The Navy intended to used the Atlas in their non-secret code-breaking centers. However, a controversy broke out in the US Congress about the Navy providing so many resources to a private company.

Remington Rand and Sperry Rand Losing money during the protracted legal debate over ERA, Parker finally sold the company to Remington Rand Inc. in 1952. Remington Rand was the creator of the UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) computer. On election night of the 1952 US Presidential election, CBS News used a UNIVAC to predict the winner. The computer correctly predicted that General Dwight D. Eisenhower would easily defeat US Senator Adlai Stevenson II, contrary to experts who believed Stevenson would win.

After purchaing ERA, Remington Rand kept the ERA team separate from the UNIVAC developers. Rand was most interested in the magnetic drum memory systems that ERA had pioneered. By the mid-1950s, Remington Rand's initial leadership with Univac was being whittled away by IBM machines that used fewer vacuum tubes.In 1955, the Sperry Corporation bought Remington Rand, forming the Sperry Rand Corporation, headed by Retired General Douglas MacArthur. The new corporation combined the Univac and ERA teams into one division, with Norris as its leader.

At first, the ERA engineers provides support for a variety of projects. Eventually, ERA was assigned to the UNIVAC II Sperry Rand wanted to use the ERA Atlas as the basis of the Univac 1101 computer. Sperry Rand then developed three Univac 1102 units for the US Air Force. They were followed by the 36-bit UNIVAC 1103. The UNIVAC projects were plagued by lengthy delays and rivalries between the UNIVAC and ERA engineers.

Birth of Control Data Corporation In 1957, several ERA employees left Sperry Rand to form the Control Data Corporation (CDC).Control Data Corporation was incorporated in Minnesota, July 8, 1957—see They were Robert Perkins, William R. Keye, Howard Shekel, Norris and Robert Kisch. The men moved into an old warehouse across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.The partners elected Norris as chief executive officer of CDC. Cray also wanted to join the new venture. However, he stayed at Sperry Rand to complete a prototype for the M-460 Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS).

CDC 1604

CDC started business in 1957 by selling computer subsystems, mostly drum memory systems, to other computer companies. When Cray finally joined CDC in 1958, he was named chief designer. His first project was a prototype known as the CDC Little Character. The was a small transistor-based 6-bit machine that Cray designed to test his ideas on large-system design and transistor-based machines.Cray then designed CDC's first mainframe, the CDC 1604.

In October 1959, CDC released the CDC 1604 computer. Unlike the UNIVAC1103, which used 3,900 vacuum tubes, the 1604 was fully transitorized.Using transistors instead of vacuum tubes, the CDC 1604 became the most powerful computer in world, far more reliable than its rivals with vacuum tubes. CDC delivered the first CDC 1604 to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

CDC in 1960 released the CDC 160A, a less expensive, 12-bit cut-down version of the CDC 1604. This system is often considered to be one of the first minicomputers. The 160A was built as a standard office desktop, an unusual packaging for that era. In 1964, CDC introduced the CDC 3000 mainframe series, containing new versions of the basic CDC 1604 architecture.

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 CDC 1604. This required radical changes in design, and as the project "dragged on" — it had gone on for about four years by then — CDC 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 Norris could visit Cray's laboratory without an invitation.

Peripherals business In the early 1960s, CDC 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 International Business Machines (IBM). To do this, he started an aggressive program of buying up various companies to round out CDC's computer peripherals product line. The CDC strategy was to offer a peripheral product to compete with any of IBM's, but running 10% faster and costing 10% less.

Tape transport

One of CDC's first peripherals was the CDC 607 tape transport, an assembly that moves magnetic tape through a playback device. This product line 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" away the tape transports at cost as part of a system purchase, they would never have a real budget of their own.

CDC finally created a plan in which the Periperals Division would share profits with the divisions selling its peripherals, a plan eventually used throughout the company.

Card reader and card punch

The tape transport was followed by the CDC 405 Card Reader and CDC 415 Card Punch.Model numbers for CDC's Reader & Punch: CDC then developed a series of tape drives and drum printers in house. 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, its production costs were high.

CDC then purchased 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.

Printers The CDC printer business was initially supported by Holley Carburetor in Rochester, Michigan. The two companies later formalized this partnership by creating a jointly held company, Holley Computer Products. Holley later sold its stake back to CDC, the remainder becoming the Rochester Division.

The Rochester Division developed train printers and band printers in a joint venture with National Cash Register (NCL) and International Computers Limited (ICL), with CDC holding a controlling interest. This company was named Computer Peripherals, Inc. (CPI). CDC in 1982 bought a controlling interest in Centronics, a manufacturer of dot matrix printers and merged CPI into it.

OCR systems Norris was particularly interested in breaking out of the punched card–based workflow, dominated by IBM. He bought Rabinow Engineering, a pioner in the manufacture of optical character recognition (OCR) systems. The idea was to bypass the entire punched card stage by having the operators simply type content onto normal paper pages, using an OCR-friendly typewriter font. The operator could then use a reader to upload the content into the computer. Since a typed page contained 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.

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