William C. Norris

Cofounder and CEO of Control Data Corporation

• Born: July 14, 1911
• Place of Birth: Red Cloud, Nebraska
• Died: August 21, 2006
• Place of Death: Bloomington, Minnesota

Primary Company/Organization: Control Data Corporation

Introduction

William C. Norris was a pioneering computer executive, serving as president of Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the period when it was one of the nine largest computer companies in the United States. CDC was well known both for the speed of its computers and for its commitment to social justice. CDC under Norris's leadership came to define supercomputing and also developed a highly profitable line of peripherals and services. During the 1980s, as users turned to personal computers (PCs) rather than the mainframes for which CDC was known, the company struggled. Eventually CDC left the computer industry, unable to compete in the changing marketplace.

Early Life

William Charles Norris was born with his twin sister Willa on July 14, 1911, near Red Cloud, Nebraska. On their farm, which had been homesteaded by his grandfather in 1872, his parents raised cattle and hogs and grew corn. Norris and Willa had an older sister, and the three attended a one-room country schoolhouse where physics quickly became Norris's favorite subject. Even as a child, he was fascinated by electronics, becoming a ham radio operator after building a mail-order radio set. Always a strong student, Norris enrolled at the University of Nebraska, where he studied electrical engineering, graduating in 1932.

Life's Work

After graduating from the university, Norris joined Westinghouse Electric Company, then a major manufacturer of electronics, broadcasting equipment, weapons, and other products. Norris served in the U.S. Navy for five years during World War II, working as a cryptographer in the Communications Supplementary Activity-Washington (CSAW) division. Norris worked on code breaking and developing electronic devices that would assist in this process. Upon his honorable discharge from the Navy, Norris joined a group of fellow veterans to form Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a pioneering firm devoted to building scientific computers.

Norris and his colleagues Joseph Wenger and Howard Engstrom began searching for investors to assist in supporting ERA, but initially they were unsuccessful because most investment firms were doubtful about the future of computers. In 1946, Norris, Wenger, and Engstrom met with John Parker, an investment banker who, during the war, had run Northwest Aeronautical Corporation (NAC), a division of Chase Aircraft Company. NAC was in the process of closing its operations in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Parker wanted to keep the factory running. Although he knew nothing about ERA's products, Parker backed the new company, and under Norris's leadership, ERA moved into the former NAC factory in 1946.

During its early years, ERA devoted a great deal of its time devising code-breaking machines for the Navy. Among the machines ERA completed were the Goldberg machine, which used a magnetic drum memory system, created by physically gluing magnetic tape to the surface of a metal cylinder. ERA next completed Demon machines, which used paper tape to feed data into the mechanism. Finally, ERA created the first device with stored memory, the ERA 1101, with drum memory using magnetic data storage. In 1952, after a controversy instigated by newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who suggested that ERA, through its officers Norris and Engstrom, had ignored conflicts of interest to profit from their wartime service, ERA was sold to the Remington Rand Corporation. Three years later, Remington Rand was acquired by Sperry Corporation, creating the Sperry Rand Corporation. Sperry Rand discontinued much of ERA's work, causing displeasure among Norris, Engstrom, and others who remained with the company. Especially troubling to the ERA veterans was the use of their magnetic drums in the Sperry Rand UNIVAC 1103, a successor to the ERA 1101. A group of these disgruntled ERA employees left Sperry Rand in 1957 to form CDC, moving to a new research facility in Minneapolis at 501 Park Avenue, directly across the Mississippi River from Sperry Rand's laboratories.

Once established in Minneapolis, Norris began CDC's operations by developing business, initially focused mainly on selling subsystems, such as drum memory systems, to other manufacturers of computers and business machines. Using the concept initially realized for the UNIVAC 1103, in 1959 a team of CDC engineers under the leadership of Seymour Cray developed a 46-bit transistorized computer, the CDC 1604, the first such machine to be commercially successful. Legend has it the number 1604 was devised by adding the 1103 from the UNIVAC model to the 501 from CDC's Minneapolis street address. CDC delivered the first 1604 to the U.S. Navy for use with fleet operations control centers, and by 1964 CDC had built more than fifty such systems. During the mid-1960s, the CDC 3000 succeeded the 1604 and was highly successful with the business community. By the time the CDC 3000 was introduced, CDC was one of the nine major computer manufacturers in the United States, along with Burroughs Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), General Electric Company (GE), Honeywell, Inc., International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), the National Cash Register Company (NCR), the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), and Sperry Rand. CDC also created a smaller, 12-bit version of the computer, the CDC 160A, which it introduced in 1960 and which was one of the first minicomputers.

Cray continued working to devise more powerful computers, vowing that his next machine would be fifty times faster than the CDC 1604. Although the project took longer than expected, when CDC management demanded more accountability from Cray, he insisted that CDC build him his own laboratory in his hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Cray's influence was such that CDC built the laboratory for him, which no one, including Norris, was permitted to visit. During this period, CDC also built its peripheral business, focusing on tape transport, card readers, card punches, tape drives, drum printers, and other such devices. CDC developed its peripheral business in part because Norris believed that in order to compete with industry leader IBM, the company needed to offer a full line of products. Norris also instituted a series of money-losing “service bureaus,” designed to provide computing expertise to smaller companies unable to afford their own machines.

By 1964, Cray had unveiled the CDC 6600, a machine ten times faster than its closest competitor. The rollout of the CDC 6600 caused IBM to develop a team of more than two hundred to develop a computer that was faster than CDC's machine. IBM's Advanced Computing System worked on a prototype supercomputer, the ACS-1, for most of the 1960s, although the machine was never produced commercially. Disappointment in the program's cancellation in 1969 led many of IBM's top engineers to leave the company. Ultimately, IBM announced that it had developed a version of its popular 360 system that was faster than the CDC 6600; although this was untrue, sales of the CDC 6600 declined dramatically. CDC ultimately sued IBM for unfair trade practices and won an $80 million settlement.

CDC continued to develop faster computers, unveiling the CDC 7600 in 1969. The CDC 7600 was four times faster than the CDC 6600 and remained the fastest computer available worldwide until approximately 1975. Although fast, the CDC 7600 was incompatible with the 6600 and had the reputation for being unreliable, damaging CDC's reputation as a result. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company but continued to receive strong support from Norris. CDC remained committed to producing supercomputers through the 1980s. After several Japanese companies entered the supercomputer field during the early to mid-1980s, however, Norris decided it was in CDC's best interests to focus instead on other markets, such as hard drives. Although its technology was often superior to that of the competition, CDC found it difficult to compete in many markets, often losing market share to other companies. Norris was forced to retire in 1986, and CDC began the process of winding down as a going concern. As a result, CDC sold off many divisions during the 1980s as it attempted to reorganize. By 1992, all that remained of CDC was its services business, which was renamed Ceridian Corporation, which continued as a successful information services company.

Norris's leadership of CDC saw efforts that established the sale of what are today well-known products and expertise, such as large-scale scientific computers, computer services, and applications of technology in education. Norris also stressed the creation of a supportive and nurturing workplace. While chief executive officer (CEO) of CDC, Norris frequently engaged in activities that pursued new business opportunities for the underserved through cooperation with the public and nonprofit sectors. Under Norris's leadership, CDC often supported small-business incubators, which are estimated to have led to more than one thousand start-up businesses and more than thirteen thousand jobs.

Personal Life

Norris and his wife, Jane Malley Norris, had eight children—William, George, Daniel, Brian, Roger, David, Constance, and Mary Keck. A devoted family man, Norris was deeply committed throughout his life to corporate sponsorship of community projects, charitable giving, and making business decisions that would have a positive impact on the community. In 1967, for example, Norris attended a seminar hosted by the National Urban League, where he spoke with civil rights leader Whitney Young regarding the social injustices facing many African Americans. Moved to respond, Norris transferred some CDC manufacturing capacity to inner-city factories, provided training to a host of new employees, and vigorously attempted to recruit minority workers. Norris also served as an advocate for an educational system developed at the University of Illinois, Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations (PLATO). The PLATO system was devised during the early 1960s as a means to provide educational opportunity to students who otherwise did not have access to good teachers. After funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) expired in the early 1970s, Norris had CDC support the program in an effort to continue what he saw as a means of ensuring social justice.

After leaving CDC, in 1988 Norris founded the William C. Norris Institute, a nonprofit organization for which he served as chair until 2000. The Norris Institute supported a variety of projects, including attempts to improve education through the use of technology, providing technical training in Russia, and supporting small business incubators in low-income neighborhoods in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 2001, Norris merged the Institute with St. Thomas University, where it has sought to assist with the development of commercial uses of Minnesota entrepreneurs' innovative and socially beneficial technologies.

After a long struggle with Parkinson's disease, Norris died on August 21, 2006, in a nursing home in Bloomington, Minnesota, survived by his wife, children, twenty-one grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Bibliography

DiConti, M. A. Entrepreneurship in Training: The Multinational Corporation in Mexico and Canada. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1992. Print.

Hart, D. M. “From ‘Ward of the State’ to ‘Revolutionary Without a Movement’: The Political Development of William C. Norris and Control Data Corporation, 1957–1986.” Enterprise and Society 6.2 (2005): 197–223. Print.

Johnson, T. Time to Take Control: The Impact of Change on Corporate Computer Systems. Newton: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997. Print.

"William Norris." IEEE Computer Society, www.computer.org/profiles/william-norris. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Worthy, J. C. William C. Norris: Portrait of a Maverick. New York: Ballinger, 1987. Print.