Carl Lowenstein wrote:
On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 11:43 PM, James G. Sack (jim) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
James E. Henderson wrote:
>..
> In 1963, when I was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, for classes in
> repairing the military computers we were going to use on board
> submarines, I got a tour of the Univac factory there and got to watch
> the cores being manufactured.
. . .
I wonder why Minnesota was the location for computer manufacturing.
Wasn't Control Data in Minneapolis? And what else? Maybe Cray -- didn't
he originate in CDC?
Well, a small part of the answer is that Engineering Research
Associates (ERA) of St. Paul had been developing digital circuitry and
rotating drum memories for use in government crypto applications
during WWII. Seymour Cray got a job fresh out of college in 1951 at
ERA. In 1952 Remington-Rand bought Eckert-Mauchly (Univac) of
Philadelphia and ERA of St.Paul and did some merging.
Lots of information can be obtained from _A History of Modern
Computing_, Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press 1998.
Or you could start with Wikipedia, main entries UNIVAC and Engineering
Research Associates.
Control Data Corporation was started by engineers who left Univac. They
had figured out that it was cheaper to build half-sized core memories
and page between them than to build full sized core memories. That
allowed them to build machines with the same capability as their Univac
opposite numbers at a considerably lower price, always an advantage in
business.
James
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