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Control Data made some great mainframe computers for awhile. We had a few CDC 3000 terminals in the scheduling room at the MSP airport. But the mainframe itself was IBM.

Another thing is that Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Research the company who made supercomoputes got his start at Control Data.

It seems to me that Control Data, otherwise known as CDC lost it's momentum in the mid 70's. They stopped making mainframes and then focused on computer parts like hard disk drives, etc. Then they disappeared.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Data_Corporation
 
'A Few Good Men from UNIVAC'

I have a tremendous respect for Control Data. Back in the early 50's, after Rem Rand brought UNIVAC into the fold, the parent company decided they needed to add a scientific computer line to their offering (as opposed to the UNIVAC series which were business oriented). Engineering Research Associates out of St. Paul, we're doing very interesting things in the computer and memory fields, and had recently released the ERA 1101. Because they were started as a military spinoff, there was concern about offering a machine for sale to the corporate market and the computer division was sold off to Rem Rand.

The ERA guys (including Cray) decided to leave and form their own company, Control Data, and other bright, (now) famous engineers jumped ship in the following months to join them. Meanwhile, having two competing design teams with two completely different architectures, located halfway across the country, only lead to further infighting within Rem Rand.

IBM had the Stretch, and UNIVAC had the LARC, but CDC showed the world that a small bunch of bright guys could make the fastest machines in the world. Talk to anyone that programmed the CDC series and they'll talk about the powerful simplicity of the Instruction set. This dominance drove IBM mad.

Now, Cray was always pushing the latest technology, and in that business, you're always working against unknowns. With a development time measured in years, you bet the farm on each new design at the onset and hope you've picked the right technology (like gallium arsenide). And these guys were funding development of this tech each time. This made things a little rough, cash-flow wise. A schedule slip, or a losing design, really put the hurt on. Meanwhile, the company had grown into a large, slow moving, focus-drifting, corporation. The cold war was over, military spending had been cut drastically, and the need (and money) for large super computers was no longer there.

Cray had enough of the bean counters and beauracracy and decided it was time to move on (again). He founded Cray Research, and went on to release the famous Cray supercomputers until his life was tragically cut short. A very interesting guy, and a true genius by definition.
 
Cool 083!

We had rows of those when I was a programmer for a large Baltimore bank submitting card decks to a dumbwaiter to the 3rd floor where they were running a System/370 then a 3033, and finally a 3081 when I left to return to teaching... ah those punch card days... I hated those things!

I thought I was the only one here into old DP machines! So here's a small teaser of the latest piece for our vintage electronics collection... anyone know what is is? You'd have to be an old timer like me to have used one.

firedome++10-4-2013-16-42-37.jpg
 
I had the occasion to meet Seymour Cray a time or two. He flew North Central quite often.

Cray YMP supercomputers were all the rage in the late 80's & 90's. Due to their nature that had very specific environmental requirements. They weren't water cooled, but freon cooled. In each circuit board there were coolant galleries built in. And the computers were round. Why? Seymour Cray thought it took too much time for a signal to have to go around a corner in a computer box. It the computer is round you can have very direct wiring. Also there was no financing or leasing of Cray computers. You just handed them a cashiers check for $1 mil upon delivery.

Exxon had a couple of these. I know a guy who worked there and on one weekend I got to go visit the Cray. Here is one in the photo below. When you order a Cray you get to pick the colors and if you look near the bottom of the computer you can tell that there are seat cushions over the part that houses the cooling system.
Now Exxon being a very conservative company told Cray that they don't need no seat cushions on a computer and they don't want them. Cray told them that if they don't want the seat cushions, then they don't want a Cray! So Exxon got the seat cushions on their Cray.

whirlcool++10-5-2013-19-43-13.jpg
 
Firedome!

I can't tell you the model, but the equipment is from Digital Equipment Corporation. (DEC) I used several of their minicomputers back in the 70s and 80s. Right now I'm looking at a bus grant continuity card from an 11/34 that I happened to save from oblivion at some point.

nurdlinger++10-5-2013-21-48-40.jpg
 
Ding ding ding!!

Good eye nurdlinger!

Those little Y shaped handles at the back are typical DEC giveaways... this one is in fact a DEC PDP-11/10 circa '71-74ish... one of the last of the "blinkenlights and toggle switch" machines that allowed programmers to input data/instructions manually. Actually used one of these after the IBM programming days when I went back to BioPhysics teaching & research, DECs were used in a lot of labs and academic settings before powerful micros booted them into obscurity. Been looking for one for a very long time, they are getting very hard to find now, most considered hopelessly obsolete and long gone to the scrap heap. Here's the front panel:

firedome++10-7-2013-14-40-28.jpg
 
I love looking at all of this old computer equipment. My dad worked for TI starting in about 1963 and saw the industry evolve from vacuum tubes and punch cards to microsized solid state. He was one of the key engineers who developed laptops for TI (late 1980s) and Compaq (early to mid 1990s).

 

The last time I used a punch card was in Elementary school. I remember the entire first or second grade class sitting in the cafeteria as a teacher walked us through marking cards with our personal data - IIRC (and others here can correct me - my memory might be wrong) we filled in squares with a pencil and a machine punched the marked squares out to make the punch card. That would have been 1975-76 time frame.
 
Ah, the good old IBM "mark sense" cards. They had a special reader that could sense where the #2 pencil marks were and punch them out. We used those in college to select our classes for the semester 1971-74. Each class had a card and you marked with a pencil what "section" or time period you wanted the class. In a few days you went by the registration office to pick up your class schedule.
 
Ya, but Paul...

then you'd be glowing in the dark!

Lots of school testing outfits like the College Board (SAT), ACT as well as local schools used those graphite mark sensing cards, our county schools had one of the reading machines.
 

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