The Factories That Built the Computer Age

The computer industry is usually told as a story of ideas: Turing, von Neumann, the transistor, the integrated circuit. It can also be told as a story of buildings. In the decade after the Second World War, the machines that began the commercial computer business were assembled by hand in a small number of industrial sites, most of them repurposed from other uses. This feature follows those places.

Philadelphia: a start-up in a knitting mill

The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation operated from a former knitting mill on Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia. Here, with a staff that grew from a dozen to a few hundred, the company built the BINAC for Northrop Aircraft and then the UNIVAC I. The building had been chosen for cheap space, not for suitability. Accounts from the period describe the mercury delay-line memory units, which were sensitive to temperature, being built in a plant with little climate control, and the enormous machines being assembled on floors never designed for the weight.

After Remington Rand bought the company in 1950, the Philadelphia operation continued to build UNIVACs. The division's center of gravity later shifted to suburban Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, where Sperry UNIVAC built a large campus. The Ridge Avenue building's later history is a matter of local record rather than corporate history, and it is the kind of detail that archival research is needed to settle.

St. Paul: cryptanalysts in a glider factory

Engineering Research Associates was founded in 1946 by veterans of the Navy's wartime code-breaking operation, with the Navy as its first and most important customer. The company set up in a former glider factory in St. Paul, Minnesota, a building that had produced troop gliders during the war. There it developed magnetic drum memory and built some of the earliest stored-program computers for the government.

Remington Rand bought ERA in 1952. The St. Paul operation became the other half of the UNIVAC division, and it seeded a regional computer industry: Control Data Corporation was founded in 1957 by former ERA engineers, and the Twin Cities remained a center of large-computer manufacturing for decades.

Norwalk and Ilion: the office-machine inheritance

Remington Rand's own research laboratory was in Norwalk, Connecticut, where engineers developed punched-card electronic calculators in the late 1940s and worked on later UNIVAC models. Farther north, in Ilion, New York, the Remington typewriter works that gave the company half its name continued to make the machines that had defined office work before computers.

The documents

The corporate record of this period survives in several archives. The Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, holds Sperry UNIVAC and Remington Rand records. The Charles Babbage Institute in Minneapolis holds material on ERA and on Control Data. The U.S. Census Bureau's history office documents the first UNIVAC installation. These are the sources against which any account of the period, including this one, must be checked.

Timeline

1. 1946

   Two companies founded

   Eckert and Mauchly form their company in Philadelphia; ERA is founded in St. Paul.

2. 1949

   BINAC

   The first computer sold commercially in the U.S. is delivered to Northrop.

3. 1950

   Remington Rand buys Eckert-Mauchly

   The Philadelphia plant becomes part of an office-machine company.

4. 1951

   UNIVAC I

   Accepted by the Census Bureau; the first of 46 built.

5. 1952

   Remington Rand buys ERA

   The St. Paul plant joins the UNIVAC business.

6. 1955

   Sperry Rand

   Merger with Sperry Corporation.

7. 1957

   Control Data founded

   Former ERA engineers start a new company in the Twin Cities.

What the places tell us

None of the companies that built the first commercial computers exists under its own name. All of the places do. Philadelphia, St. Paul, Norwalk and Ilion each carry the marks of an industry that arrived, reshaped the local economy and moved on, a cycle that towns built around today's technologies may face in turn. The archive is where that cycle can be studied, which is why its digitization matters.