Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
World War II. The man that would turn out to be the firm's most noted employee, however,
was not a veteran of the World War II effort but rather a 1951 graduate of the University of
Minnesota. Seymour R. Cray was to leave large tracks in the development of digital tech-
nology and eventually be dubbed "the father of supercomputing." As Joel Birnbaum, one-
time Chief Technology Officer of Hewlett Packard has remarked: "It seems impossible to
exaggerate the effect [Cray] had on the industry; many of the things that high performance
computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envi-
sioned them."
Originally developed on commission from the U.S. Navy, the 1101 was designed spe-
cifically for scientific and engineering purposes rather than business data processing. As
Ceruzzi notes: "The 1103 used binary arithmetic, a 36-bit word length, and operated on all
the bits of a word at a time. Primary memory of 1,024 words was supplied by Williams
tubes, with an ERA-designed magnetic drum, and four magnetic tape units for secondary
storage."
After its purchase of ERA, Remington Rand was therefore able to simultaneously offer
two distinct machines: the 1101 (soon supplanted by an improved model 1103, released
1953) for dedicated science and engineering purposes, and the UNIVAC with an emphasis
on business processing. In the end, Remington Rand sold a total of 20 installations of the
1101 and 1103, most of these going to DOD agencies and aerospace firms contracting with
the government.
Several other corporations joined IBM and Remington Rand in the mainframe market-
place, none with great results.
The Minneapolis-based controls-maker Honeywell, after acquiring the fledgling and
as-yet unsuccessful computer division of Raytheon in 1955, delivered a mainframe called
the Datamatic 1000 in 1957. The machine was a disaster. Although it worked efficiently, it
ran on technology that was already well on the way to being obsolete. Most notably, it used
vacuum tubes instead of transistors. Not until the mid-1960s, and the launch of its 200 Ser-
ies of mainframes, would Honeywell produce a machine in step with current technology,
albeit futilely in step, as shall be shown.
General Electric - in 1955 a $3 billion firm and thus a behemoth compared to IBM
($461 million) and Remington Rand ($225 million before its merger with Sperry) - could
have had a great shot at seizing a large part of the mainframe marketplace, had corporate
management been willing. They were not.
GE developed a very efficient and elegant machine, the OARAC (Office of Air Re-
search Automatic Calculator), for the Air Force in 1953. Although this machine was com-
pletely capable of the range of the data processing tasks serviced by the UNIVAC and IBM
700 series, the management of GE decided against marketing the mainframe to private in-
dustry. The reasons for this are unclear and much debated, although conventional wisdom
