# Steve Blank The Secret History of Minnesota Part 1: Engineering Research Associates

<https://steveblank.com/2023/12/11/the-secret-history-of-minnesota-part-1-engineering-research-associates/>

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- Saved: December 11, 2023 (2023-12-12T02:56:09Z)
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## What Jamie wrote

This is **part 17** of [Steve Blank](https://steveblank.com/about/)'s [Secret History](https://steveblank.com/secret-history/) series, and it is just part one of his detailed history of the critical role Minnesota served in computing.

> Meanwhile the biggest and fastest _scientific_ computer companies were in Minnesota. And by 1966 they had been delivering computers for 16 years.
> 
> Minneapolis/St. Paul area companies ERA, Control Data and Cray would dominate the world of scientific computing and be an innovation cluster for computing until the mid-1980s. And then they were gone.
> 
> Why?
> 
> Just as Silicon Valley's roots can be traced to innovation in World War II so can Minneapolis/St. Paul's. The story starts with a company you probably never heard of -- **[Engineering Research Associates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_Research_Associates)**.

Blank goes into great detail and shares the origin story of how this grows in Minnesota, and connects it as well to the future growth that I would assume part 2 will cover.

> Seymour Cray would reuse features of the Bogart logic design when he designed the [Navy Tactical Data System computers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Tactical_Data_System), the [UNIVAC 490](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/USQ-17) and the Control Data Corporation's [CDC 1604](https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/october/16/) and [CDC 160](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_160_series).
> 
> By 1953, 40% of the University of Minnesota electrical engineering graduates -- including Cray -- were working for ERA.

What an incredible concentration of talent. 

> But the era of Minnesota's role as a scientific computing and innovation cluster wasn't over. In fact, it was just getting started. In 1957 ERA co-founder William Norris, and Sperry-Univac engineers Seymour Cray, Willis Drake, and ERA's treasurer Arnold Ryden, along with a half dozen others, left Sperry-Univac and teamed up with three investors to form a new Minneapolis-based computer company: Control Data Corporation (CDC). For the next two decades Control Data would build the fastest scientific computers in the world.

Looking forward to the next installment.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT273: Weekly Thing 273 / Trippy, Buffalo, Bitkey](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/273/), Featured

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://steveblank.com/2023/12/11/the-secret-history-of-minnesota-part-1-engineering-research-associates/