The ElectroData Corporation was a computer company located in Pasadena, California.
ElectroData originated as a part of Consolidated Electrodynamics Corporation (CEC), which manufactured scientific equipment. Clifford Berry and Sibyl M. Rock developed an analog computer to process the output of CEC's mass spectrometer. Berry then urged CEC to develop a digital computer as a follow-on. In 1951 CEC enlisted Harry Huskey, who managed the development of the SWAC computer on the project. [1] [2]
In May 1952, CEC pre-announced the "CEC 30-201" computer, a vacuum tube computer with a magnetic-drum memory. That same year CEC reorganized computer development into a separate Computer Division. In 1954 the division was spun off into a separate public company named ElectroData. In 1954 the first model of the computer, now named the Datatron 203 shipped to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The purchase price was $125,000. The company shipped seven more 203 systems in 1954 and thirteen in 1955.
By 1956 ElectroData was the third-largest computer manufacturer in the world, but was unable to generate enough revenue to meet the demands of growing the business. That year Burroughs Corporation, at that time a manufacturer of electro-mechanical office equipment, made a deal to acquire ElectroData in a stock swap, and renamed it the ElectroData Division of Burroughs Corporation. The Datatron was renamed the Burroughs 205.
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Herman Hollerith was an American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the NCR Corporation (NCR), General Electric, and Honeywell, RCA and UNIVAC. For most of the 1960s, the strength of CDC was the work of the electrical engineer Seymour Cray who developed a series of fast computers, then considered the fastest computing machines in the world; in the 1970s, Cray left the Control Data Corporation and founded Cray Research (CRI) to design and make supercomputers. In 1988, after much financial loss, the Control Data Corporation began withdrawing from making computers and sold the affiliated companies of CDC; in 1992, Cray established Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining affiliate companies of CDC currently do business as the software company Dayforce.
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Convergent Technologies, Inc., was an American computer company formed by a small group of people who left Intel Corporation and Xerox PARC in 1979. Among the founders were CEO Allen Michels, VP Engineering Bob Garrow, head of marketing Kal Hubler, and operating system architect Ben Wegbreit. Convergent was primarily an OEM vendor with their computers resold by other manufacturers such as ADP, AT&T, Burroughs, Four-Phase Systems, Gould, Mohawk, Monroe Data Systems, NCR, and Prime. The company was purchased by Unisys in 1988.
Litton Industries, Inc., was an American defense contractor that specialized in shipbuilding, aerospace, electronic components, and information technology. The company was founded in 1953 and was named after inventor Charles Litton Sr., who was also an early investor in the company.
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Sibyl Martha Rock was an American inventor who was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's (CEC) mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrometer and an early digital computer, CEC's Datatron.
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The Datatron is a family of decimal vacuum tube computers developed by ElectroData Corporation and first shipped in 1954. The Datatron was later marketed by Burroughs Corporation after Burroughs acquired ElectroData in 1956. The Burroughs models of this machine were still in use into the 1960s.