Silicon Prairie: The Supercomputing Industry in Minnesota

By Pavek Museum Curator Dr. Luis Felipe Eguiarte Souza
Edited by Kaeleen Laird

October 2024

Minnesota may not be the first place that comes to mind when discussing computer innovation. However, from the 1950s to the late 1980s, Minnesota served as an incubator for groundbreaking technological advancements in computing. Surprisingly, the origin traces back to a small airplane manufacturing company in St. Paul, Minnesota.

An airplane manufacturing company? You might be wondering how it is connected to computer making. Let’s start at the beginning, with a day that would live in infamy…December 7, 1941. A surprise attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into the largest armed conflict in human history, World War II. As the war effort ramped up at home, two unique mathematical challenges arose: one, deciphering enemy-encoded messages, and two, doing complex calculations to know where to drop bombs and how to fire canons (commonly known as “firing solutions”). Both of these mathematical problems were traditionally done by women who would be called “computers” because they would solve mathematical problems. But there was only so much the human mind could calculate simultaneously, so the idea of creating a new technology that could do this faster than any human became a high priority.

Minnesota Supercomputing

In search of a location to build this new technology, the United States Navy chose the Midwest for its isolation from outside influences. The government was concerned about German attacks on the East Coast and fear of Japanese espionage on the West Coast. Going as far as signing Executive Order 9066, which forced all Japanese Americans into internment camps and restricted access in certain areas for Italian and German Americans for the duration of the war.

Northwest Aeronautical Corporation (NAC), later known as Engineer Research Associates (ERA), was a factory that produced gliders. The Navy chose ERA as the ideal place to make its computers. ERA became a classified production site in St. Paul, Minnesota. After the war, ERA convinced the Navy to keep operating as an independent contractor, marking the beginning of Minnesota’s computing dominance.

One of ERA’s initial projects involved a decrypting machine explicitly designed to decipher a particular secret language used by the Russians. As we were entering the Cold War, a conflict between two ideologies, capitalism and communism, with its two main superpowers, Russia and the US, refusing to engage directly, as this would lead to nuclear world destruction. ERA learned from this first decrypting computer that it needed to create more flexible technology. To do so, ERA created magnetic drum memory, an early advancement in computer memory that allowed an easier way to save and erase data with assistance from another Minnesota-based company, 3M.

In 1956, the computer conglomerate IBM entered Minnesota’s computing scene by opening a manufacturing plant in Rochester, Minnesota, choosing the state for its innovative environment. IBM, which stands for International Business Machines, originated from several different companies that used to make automated machines for things like punch cards, mechanical calculators, and clocks. Thomas J Watson became president of this company in 1915, and by 1924, it had received its iconic name, IBM. By the 1940s, the company decided to get into computer systems, as many of the technologies being built before used punch cards, which translated well into computing.

The following year, IBM settled in Minnesota. In 1957, ERA merged with Remington Rand, a large manufacturing company that made everything from typewriters to handguns. This merger resulted in the dissatisfaction of certain employees, who felt that such a big company would not take the risk of creating innovative computers. As such, many of them left ERA to create a new company willing to push the envelope, Control Data Corporation (CDC). Particularly under Seymour Cray’s design leadership, CDC introduced the first successful supercomputer, the CDC 1604, in 1959, featuring revolutionary improvements in memory.

 

In the early 1960s, the Minnesota-based company Honeywell entered the computing scene, creating a computer that sold so well—the Liberator computer series—that it made them a serious competitor in computer innovation. Thus, the big three of Minnesota’s computing companies are IBM Rochester, CDC, and Honeywell. Most of their work was under United States government contracts, particularly the Department of Defense. This may be why this sounds unfamiliar to some of you.

 

In 1969, the US Department of Defense connected two computers to create its new ARPANET computer network. Building on the ideas of JCR Licklider and Bob Tayler to create a computer network that universities and the US government could use to share computer resources throughout the country. This would be particularly useful in the event of a surprise nuclear attack by Russia, where this computer network could calculate the best way to respond. As the ARPANET grew during the 1970s, the big three of Minnesota computing designed computers that could be used in such networks. In particular, Honeywell’s minicomputers, like the DDP-561, were used as interface message processors (IMP), which are packet-switching nodes that help carry information from one computer to another.

As the years went on, academics from the universities participating in ARPANET particularly enjoyed the ability to exchange messages in a system that we would now call “email.” This speed-of-light communication and the ability to share computer resources led to such heavy traffic on ARPANET that the DoD created a separate computer network that academics could use. The possibilities of what this could become generated something called the “Internet Protocol (IP) Wars,” a race to see who could create the best and most accessible way to access what we now call the Internet. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, created the World Wide Web (WWW). A protocol that used the idea of hyperlinks and uniform resource locators (URLs) to create a non-hierarchical network where the everyday user could quickly jump from one website to another.

This milestone was programmed on a NeXT computer created by Steve Jobs. As the Internet was forming, another revolution in computing was happening in tandem, that of the personal computer (PC). By the late 1970s, the market for cheaper computers that could be sold to individuals grew in popularity, with the rise in companies like Apple, Commodore, and Tandy. In particular, Apple Computer marked a geographical shift for the new epicenter of computing innovation in northern California, now called Silicon Valley.

It was clear by the 1990s, with the rise of Silicon Valley and the new WWW, that the era of Minnesota computing was in decline. Companies either pivoted like Honeywell or disappeared like CDC. But we must remember that all of this would not have been possible without the quiet, steady work of Minnesota-based companies that forged the path for computing technologies.

To learn more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/30/snow-crash-neal-stephenson-metaverse/ 

 

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-neal-stephenson-named-the-metaverse-now-hes-building-it/ 

 

 Books: 

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction 

1991  

Editor: Larry McCaffery 

 

The Gernsback Continuum 

1981 

By William Gibson 

 

Technoculture  

1991  

Editors: Constance Penley and Andrew Ross 

 

Technoculture: Penley, Constance 

1948  

https://archive.org/details/technoculture00penl/mode/2up 

 

In the Beginning was the Command Line 
1999 
by Neal Stephenson 

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt