William Norris (b. July 16, 1911 near Red Cloud, Nebraska) was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities. July 16 is the 197th day (198th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 168 days remaining. ... 1911 (MCMXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (click on link for calendar). ... Red Cloud is a city located in Webster County, Nebraska. ... Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is the job of having the ultimate executive responsibility or authority within an organization or corporation. ... Control Data Corporation, or CDC, was one of the pioneering supercomputer firms. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) (NYSE: IBM) (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services. ...

Norris first entered the computer business just after World War II, when his team of US Navy cryptographers formed Engineering Research Associates to build scientific computers. ERA was fairly successful in these early days, but in the early 1950s a lengthy series of government probes into "Navy funding" drained the company and they sold out to Remington Rand. They operated within Remington Rand as a separate division for a time, but during the later merger with Sperry Corporation that formed Sperry Rand, their division was merged with UNIVAC. This resulted in most of ERA's work being dropped, and a number of employees decamped and set up Control Data, unanimously selecting Norris as president. World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: immense human suffering, fierce indoctrination, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons such as the atomic bomb. ... The United States Navy (USN) is the branch of the United States armed forces responsible for naval operations. ... Pre-19th century Leone Battista Alberti, polymath/universal genius, inventor of polyalphabetic substitution (see frequency analysis for the significance of this -- missed by most for a long time and dumbed down in the Vigenère cipher), and what may have been the first mechanical encryption aid. ... Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. ... Remington Rand was an early American computer manufacturer, best known as the original maker of the UNIVAC, and now part of Unisys. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...

Control Data started by selling drum systems to other computer manufacturers, but introduced their own mainframe, the CDC 1604, in 1958. Designed primarily by Seymour Cray, the company soon followed it with a series of increasingly powerful machines. In 1965 they introduced the CDC 6600, the first supercomputer, and CDC was suddenly in the leadership position with a machine ten times as fast as anything else on the market. Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are large and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for legacy applications, typically bulk data processing (such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and bank transaction processing). ... Gabriel Robins (left) and Seymour Cray(right) Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was a supercomputer architect who founded the company Cray Research. ... The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first manufactured in 1965. ... A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ...

This led IBM to panic, and they quickly started a project of their own to grab the performance crown back from CDC. In the meantime they announced a new machine that was supposed to be faster than the 6600. However the machine didn't actually exist, and after careful documenting the lost sales, Norris finally got fed up and launched a massive lawsuit against them in 1968. They eventually won the suit, for tens of millions of dollars. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) (NYSE: IBM) (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services. ...

In 1967 Norris attended a seminar for CEOs where Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, spoke about the social and economic injustices in the lives of most young black Americans. This speech, along with a summer of violence in Norris's hometown of Minneapolis, greatly disturbed him. He became a champion of moving factories into the inner-cities, providing stable incomes and "high-tech" training to thousands of people who would otherwise have little chance at either. Whitney M. Young Jr. ... National Urban League Logo The National Urban League is a non-profit, nonpartisan, civil rights and community-based movement that advocates on behalf of Black Americans and against racial discrimination. ...

Another CDC project that Norris championed was PLATO, an online teaching and instruction system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university developed most of the system on a CDC-1604 machine driving graphics terminals of their own design. In 1974 they reached an agreement with CDC to allow CDC to sell PLATO in exchange for free machines on which to run it. PLATO was released in 1975, but saw almost no use due to its high costs and complex maintenance. In the end PLATO did see some use as an employee training tool in large companies, but was never a success in the original education market. Plato (Greek: Πλάτων Plátōn) (ca. ... Online means being connected to the Internet or another similar electronic network, like a bulletin board system. ... The University of Illinois is the set of three public universities in Illinois. ... A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system. ...

Norris continually purchased new companies to fold into CDC, and eventually returned to the peripheral market in the 1970s. This later moved proved particularly wise, it was also during the 1970s that Cray left to form his own company, and quickly drove CDC out of its leadership position in the supercomputer market. This left CDC in second place in a tiny market, and soon large Japanese companies were gobbling up what Cray didn't. CDC tried one more time to regain a footing in the supercomputer market by spinning off ETA Systems, in order to allow the developers to escape an increasingly ossified management structure inside CDC. However this effort failed and CDC gave up on the market entirely. ETA Systems logo ETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun-off from Control Data Corporation (CDC) in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. ...

In the 1980s this left CDC primarily as a hard disk manufacturer, and their series of SCSI drives were particularly successful. But at this same point the rest of the company crashed, and the board started pressing for Norris to step down. They were particularly harsh in blaming his "social programs" for their problems, although any connection is difficult, if not impossible, to find. He eventually realized there was little he could do to stop this course of action, and started an effort to place the company under the leadership of two hand-picked replacements. The stockholders didn't go along with this, and Norris eventually retired in January 1986. Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ... SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface, and is a standard interface and command set for transferring data between devices on both internal and external computer buses. ...

External link

• William Norris: Computer Pioneer, Maverick Social Activist