Steve Blank The Secret History of Minnesota Part 1: Engineering Research Associates
steveblank.com/2023/12/11/the-secret-history-of-minnesota-part-1-engineering-research-associates
What Jamie wrote
This is part 17 of Steve Blank's 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.
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, the UNIVAC 490 and the Control Data Corporation's CDC 1604 and CDC 160.
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.