Rest in Peace, Bill Norris - computing pioneer/entreprenuer

Although it didn't get much industry attention, William Norris, founder and ex-CEO of Control Data Corporation quietly passed away this Monday in Minneapolis at the age of 95. Most know all about his chief engineer, Seymour Cray, but Norris' leadership contributions often get overlooked, especially when he gets routinely lumped in with the other BUNCH computer mainframe manufacturers of the 1960s.

Two books I know about have been written about Norris' legacy. One is a pure biography, called Portrait Of A Maverick and describes his very humble beginnings in depression-era Nebraska. The second book (and more interesting in my opinion) A Few Good Men From Univac is an engineer's perspective of the early Control Data Corporation years. Both books have me convinced that the Twin Cities area was the "Silicon Valley" of the USA during the first part of the 1960s, having taken the title away from Philadelphia. What made this geographical area special? Perhaps because Sperry-Univac was already there, as was Honeywell, but there was also a very loyal and large returning workforce from WWII, many of which were already exposed to technologies like CRTs (from radar), mechanical design, and refrigeration - all important components of computer systems at that time.

Some of Norris' contributions to the industry include:

• The way he partially financed Control Data Corporation as a startup in 1957, when venture capital for new computer manufacturers was near-impossible to obtain, by selling shares in the new venture for US $1/share (simplified pricing?) to friends and family at evening get-togethers in suburban living rooms. Sort of like a tupperware party, I guess, but more expensive (that's US $6.34/share adjusted to today), as individuals were buying hundreds of shares. Was this the first IPO of a major computer company?

• Pioneering scientific supercomputing (called "HPC" today) by focusing entirely on providing systems to weather forecasters, structural engineers, nuclear plant operators, jet manufacturers, oceanographers, university physicists and chemists, and any other communities who craved fast 60-bit floating point operations. If you ever attended the CDC User Group meetings (VIM/ECODU), these were the types of people sitting next to you.

• His approval of Seymour Cray taking his small team away from headquarters to remote Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where they could work free of distraction, leading to the development of the monumental 6600 and this very famous interchange in 1963 between CDC's chief competition and Cray:

  Thomas J Watson, CEO of IBM:
  "Last week, Control Data Corporation... announced the 6600 system. I
  understand that in the laboratory developing the system there are 
  only 34 people including the janitor. Of these, 14 are engineers
  and 4 are programmers... Contrasting this modest effort 
  with our vast development activities, I fail to understand why we
  have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone 
  else offer the the world's most powerful computer."
  
  Seymour Cray, CDC chief designer:
  "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question."
  

  It's reported that even Mr. Norris himself could not visit the Chippewa Falls Lab without prior authorization from Cray!

• Risking the entire future of CDC by taking on IBM directly, and winning a landmark antitrust suit in the history of computing.

Mr. Norris certainly got his share of criticisms, such as "he stuck around too long", "he concentrated too much on social issues and activism", "he invested too much (more than US $1B) in productizing PLATO" (an online educational/authoring system developed coincidentally at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, across the street from where the Mosaic browser would be born thirty years later), "he didn't see departmental computing coming", etc. I believe, however, that he'll be remembered for his many accomplishments and his fierce competitive drive which shaped the computing industry for a few decades, starting in 1957.

During the golden years of CDC, when they employed 60,000 people, you couldn't go from one Twin Cities suburb to another without seeing a Control Data building. That era is over now but I'm still reminded of the CDC empire whenever I'm in town and see those two somewhat-faded golden towers in Bloomington that used to serve as their headquarters.

Rest in Peace, Bill Norris (1911 - 2006)

Posted at 09:09PM Aug 22, 2006 by Peter Schow in Personal  |  Comments[0]