Preface

Misa, Thomas J.

doi:10.5749/minnesota/9780816683314.002.0006

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Preface

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https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816683314.002.0006

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October 2013

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Minnesota’s computing industry has such an obviously important history that it may seem odd that it has not been told before. The history of computing, a newly emerging historical field, took form when the “small band of digital pioneers” active originally in the 1940s and 1950s began a spirited debate over the priority claims of who built the first computer.¹ Now there is a small bookshelf of works on the pioneering computer efforts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Princeton, New Jersey, owing in no small measure to the historical resources that were intentionally made available by the U.S. Army, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Sperry Rand Univac company. The latter was even a prominent sponsor of a landmark exhibit on computing mounted by the Smithsonian Institution. Not surprisingly, these accounts directed a bright spotlight on Philadelphia.²

I first considered this story in 2006 when I came to the University of Minnesota as director of the Charles Babbage Institute, a leading research and archiving center that helped create the professional field of computing history since its founding in 1978 in Palo Alto, California. CBI was founded by a group of historically minded computer pioneers led by Erwin Tomash, who figures in these pages as an author as well as employee of the Engineering Research Associates (ERA). Tomash played a key role not least by talking up the burgeoning Minnesota computer scene in the Southern California aerospace industry, a vast early market for computers.³ At a certain moment in the halls of the Convair aerospace division of General Dynamics, these notable people were at work on Minnesota computers in California: Tomash, the future founder of the computer peripheral maker Dataproducts and later of CBI as well; Marvin Stein, the future founder of computer science at the University of Minnesota; Robert Price, the future president, chairman, and CEO of Control Data; and at least one other executive later prominent at Control Data. They might all have eaten lunch together. Price shared with me his recollections of lunchtime banter as well as the more fundamental lessons about personal relationships and corporate strategy.

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