Control Data Corporation - Experience

With the proceeds of selling our house in Phoenix, we made a down payment on a house on the west side of Pike Lake, New Brighton, Minnesota - about 3 miles from the new factory making the new Control Data 6600. ( Well, OK the folks to the south had a dock on the lake. Our lot didn't quite touch water, but we had a great view from the living room and basement ;-))

The role of the Special Systems Division was to aid Control Data Corporation ( CDC) sales into special situations - such as adapting the hardware and/or software to unusual applications such as hybrid computing.

As I arrived, a one month CDC 6600 hardware class was starting for programmers. This class was taught by a red headed woman, of uncertain temper. We were taught how to optimize code for the unusual computer architecture. I was amazed by:

• User programs are protected from each other by use of base address and length registers controlled by the operating system.
• The speed of the logic, a 60 bit integer add takes 100 nanoseconds, a normalized floating point multiply in 1 microsecond.
• There are different "Functional Units" to do different instructions - in parallel - discussed here. Note that there were two MPY functional units, if one was busy, the other was used. A "Score Board" unit kept track of times and destinations.
• The machine does not have a halt instruction - a Peripheral Processor can "Exchange Jump" the the main machine to shift it to a different program. The Exchange Jump stored the machine registers into an area of memory, then loaded the machine registers from another memory area.
• You cannot single step ( single instruction ) the machine. Debugging the hardware must have been "INTERESTING" !!
• The main machine is totally controlled by the 10 peripheral processors (PPs) .
  • One processor by convention controls the main machine,
  • One PP to control the twin display CRTs and keyboard. The CRT displays were vector graphics so for instance you want to form an "A". You blanked (turned off) the beam and moved it to the lower left of the A, turned on the beam and moved it to the top of the A, and then to the the lower right, then turned off the beam, moved it to the bar, turned on the beam, and made the bar. - and so to paint the next next character. One PP was fast enough to paint all the required characters on both tubes, 60 times a second, and also monitor the keyboard.
  • the other 8 PPs do I/O - responding to requests in a user program's address 0

The above is a brief introduction to the CDC 6600 hardware
- Software is needed to make that hardware do useful work.

• Burroughs, General Electric with the 6x5 line running GECOS, and the Control data 6x00 line running Scope, were all well ahead of IBM in the ability to:
  • Call in needed components of the operating system as needed from disc rather have all the operating system in memory all the time. ( A smaller memory works just fine. )
  • Run multiple jobs at the same time. ( Standard "Scope" could run seven user jobs, and the peripheral "job" at the same time - with the operator able to monitor and interact with each job - say mount a requested tape. )
  • "Spool" input and output to/from fast disc rather than wait for slow peripherals. ( For instance, two or three card readers could be reading job streams onto the disc for later execution as jobs. At the same time, three or four printers could be printing output from previously run jobs. -
    - IBM would have to use multiple 1401s to do the same support to the main processor, using tapes.
    - IBM later used "HASP", a connected processor to do the same thing.
    - Years later, IBM finally could do spooling from a main processor effectively.
• The design was optimized for minimum expensive memory. The software that directed the whole operation was in one PP, consisting of 4 K of 12 bit words. All of expensive main memory was available as User Memory.
  Another 4 K PP could be directed by the boss PP to do print spooling. Memory was so tight that the print spooler PP needed to load an overlay from disc to do the BIG PRINT as the header for a print job. Loading the overlay took maybe 250 milliseconds - and saved expensive core memory.
  Folks do not appreciate Seymour's money saving efficiency - they look at the bottom line, not counting up the efficiency of the machine.
• Speaking of memory - when IBM FINALLY got VMS working, the VMS operating code took up more memory than the largest CDC 6600 sold - If you ( IBM ) wanted to run user programs, more memory was required.
• The CDC 6x00 series was a scientific FORTRAN munching machine, it seemed tailored for that particular language. Eventually silly CDC corporate wanted to run COBOL on the 6x00 for business customers - such as the United Bank of Switzerland - and had a lot of trouble - needing a character oriented machine to be efficient.
• The original FORTRAN for the CDC 6x00 was called "RUN", but it had minimal optimization. Internal benchmarks tended to resemble

  
  	DO 10 I = 1,10000
  	   D = A * B + C
     10   CONTINUE
          

  and the RUN compiler would make the machine do the loop 10000 times.

  Other firms bought/made optimizing FORTRAN compilers which recognized that doing the inside of the loop once was enough - and made CDC's superior hardware look bad in benchmarks.
  CDC had a crash project to add optional optimizing features to the "RUN" FORTRAN.
  The result was "FTN" Fortran - highly optimizing - generated code as "tight" as I could produce.
  (I had done a hand coded benchmark for FFT, FTN could match it! )

What was the role of the "Special Systems" organization?
To aid sales of the CDC 6x00 line to unusual, "Special" customers, usually requiring special interfaces to equipment such as

• Analog computers ( the resulting called "Hybrid Computers" )
• Automotive test stands - such as for Volkswagen
• Aircraft flight test equipment - such as for Grumman Aircraft

• the data stream requirements of a proposed job could not be fit into the existing data streams, causing the proposed job to be deferred until sufficient resources became available ( likely by other jobs terminating )
• the customer written code exceeded the running time interval stated in the job set-up. The customer written code was terminated - protecting the computing resource for the other users.

By about three years later, about half of the 70 families who had moved to sunny California had returned mosquito infested, iced over Minnesota. Maybe it is the Minnesotans who are a little crazy !!!

In any case, we all had house price shock !!! In Minnesota, for $20,000 we had a nice house on a suburban lake. (And we could borrow a neighbor's snow blower.) In California, for twice the price we could have a slightly larger tract house.

So - shortly after moving in, about 10 of us were off to Wolfsburg, Germany to talk with Volkswagen. (You understand, the proposed customer was paying for this "study".) Along on the trip were:

• John Sansom, who had warned me (above) and offered me a job on the Volkswagen team.
  John also brains behind the analog simulation language MIMIC. Local copy of a manual from bitsavers.org
• John Munson, an analog computer guy adapting to the digital world, slated to be the Volkswagen project manager if we got the order.
• Gary Peterson slated to be the software supervisor, if we got the order.
• Some hardware guys

We met Helmut Mach, the account salesman.

from here The only other person I have known that seemed to have that same quality of deep calm force was Helmut Mach, the Control Data salesman in Germany that developed this major computer order from Volkswagen. The word about Helmut was that he had been captured by the Soviets in the battle of Stalingrad, survived the horrible German/Soviet conditions, and as a captive of the Soviets until 10 years after the war had varnished/polished furniture in factories for the upper Communist Party members. Of the 250 thousand Germans captured at Stalingrad, about 13,000 (one in twenty) survived to eventually return to Germany. Helmut had that same calm, forward looking, no nonsense, inevitable pressure. Interesting person - I noticed when our initial meeting was about over, he put his hands into his pants pockets. As we left we each got a WARM handshake -

Basically, we bid a scaled down Grumman system (above) to the German manager who had made a name for himself getting a wind tunnel to test VW "Bug" automobiles. This was another interesting guy - He said that it was inevitable that extra expenses would develop as the project proceeded - but that could not exceed 10% of the contract price - his "Iron Reserve", to be disturbed only in high stress.
(By the time the contract was delivered, very little of his "Iron Reserve" had been touched - we bid the project very well :-))

We got the project, and again I got to write the acceptance test specs and much of the acceptance test code.

This was a happy project. Six engineers came from Wolfsburg, to learn the system and help assure we were doing what was needed. They were a lot of fun.

One of the VW engineers was Matt ?Zurcha? who had been on the ?Austrian? cross country ski team. My wife and I were involved with the Ski Touring Section, in the Sierra Club. Matt could ski circles around us all. One winter trip, the club and Matt went ski touring near Mt. Bishop in the east Sierras. We drove as high as we could, but could not leave the cars there. Matt was one of the volunteers to drive the cars down to official parking and "catch up". Soon Matt "caught up" as we were struggling up in deep snow - waving happily as he passed by. The rest of us finally got to some frozen lake to set up snow camp when we heard shrieks of joy and yelling from high above. Matt blew into the snow camp maybe a half hour later, he had gotten way up on Mt. Bishop, and was celebrating on the way down. "The rest of us" were properly humbled. He was actually a really nice guy - short, scrawny, a good enough mathematician, but could he ski !!!!

As part of the contract, VW sent 6 "test stands" to Sunnyvale to assure that we could talk to them properly. (In this business, surprises are mostly unpleasant.) There was a MAJOR hang up in U.S. Customs. They Wouldn't be convinced that these test stands would be returning to Germany with the system. After some political/diplomatic mumbo-jumbo ( $?? ) they were FINALLY released from the port of entry.

So, after a year or so, the system was ready, and shipped. This time I "helped" install it in Wolfsburg. By the time we arrived, the hardware was up and running - and the software/performace testing was very smooth. I wanted to go home, but my German tester counterpart wanted to go to the Munich Olympics, and I was pressured to stay handy.

The wife came over to Germany and we went to Switzerland to see the mountains. We were at a restaurant when suddenly people stopped talking, and the radio was turned up.
What was happening ??? ??? After a while, someone explained that some Muslims had killed many Israeli athletes at the Olympic Village.

Not only that, but I have met many people who have worked on major software projects, and hated the experience. I had (mostly) a good time, well paid for having fun :-)

Some considerations seem to be:

1. I came in to a group that was competent and had created and shipped much of the special (time critical) software before. Individual special projects were based on a known, proven base.
2. The top manager (managed several project managers) was experienced in business, with some hardware & some software experience.
3. He was not pressured, nor did he pressure, to get every possible contract. We could walk away if the project did not fit our experience, our cost/time estimates, or the pricing too sharp.
4. He encouraged customers to send knowledgeable people (typically half a dozen with some software experience) to help with the effort, and be able make modifications after system acceptance. We did not want to be in the software maintenance business.
   • These people could provide practical guidance about things that were not fully specified in the carefully crafted contracts we developed.
   • (I presume they reported back to their HQ good progress, and helped keep their HQ out of our hair.)
5. On the Volkswagen project (above), the customer sent six types of test stands for us to verify that our hardware and software worked as expected before everything shipped, California - to Germany. There was even a door slamming test stand, as well as engine test stands. One engine test stand was programmed for an engine run from Wolfsburg to D sseldorf, Germany.
6. (The customer was responsible for dealing with the customs officials of each country - non-trivial.)

• One of Special System's core businesses, hybrid computing, was declining. The price performance of digital computing was getting VERY competitive with analog computing
  • MIMIC (above) and other analog simulation languages were being used instead of painful set up of analog computers
  • Attempts to have digital computers do high speed set up of analog computers with fancy switches was marginal - many intermittent electromechanical problems
• Control Data, Special Systems, had made a major contract with Swiss banking, using the CDC 6xxx family, (wonderful FORTRAN floating point munchers) were painfully slow and awkward at COBOL, and this project was not doing well. Control Data had no concept of Data Processing, JCL - Job Control Language, checkpoints, journal tapes for recovery, banking, business data processing, ...
  Control Data was at a standing start in a world dominated by IBM who had been thriving in that business for decades !!!!
• No nice big fat juicy projects seemed available for bidding, execution. I had made a number of trips to prospects with John Samson - nothing promising -
• I became convinced that Control Data did not know how to make money on the software tools we were using. Too much tweaking, not enough standard stuff.
• And most frightening of all, Control Data pulled all their sales force out of Special Systems Sunnyvale back to Minneapolis !!! It was hard enough to educate the sales force as to our special benefits - Including "Time Critical" guaranteed performance, rather than best effort "Real Time" computing.

RCA (a force in computers at the time) was hiring into their Educational Division in Palo Alto. On the way to the interview, in the RCA building, I bumped into my old nemesis, Tagtow from the Grumman project - he said he was a manager there - I don't even go the few feet further to the interview.
I was lucky !! A few months later, RCA shocked the computer "community" by announcing the closure of all their Computer Operations, including the Educational Division.
(Unlike General Electric they didn't even sell the computer operations off, RCA just closed the doors.)

I also applied at General Electric Atomic Division in San Jose. They wanted someone who knew the GE 645 and its GIOC (General Input/Output Controller). Since I was involved with the diagnostic tests for the GIOC, I figured I was one of the most qualified candidates in the world for that job. I talked with some HR person, who knew nothing useful at all. We looked cross-eyed at each other - he said I was unsuitable. I asked if I could talk with Dr. Weinberg, who had placed the ad. The HR guy said "NO". I later called Dr. Weinberg, who said I had to go through HR.
Again I was lucky !!! The atomic energy business in the U.S. collapsed with in a year !!!

I then got into Measurex and was happy for about 18 years :-))
In my son Carl's words, I was no longer an "iterant programmer" ;-))

After a day or two he could and did make useful contributions.

What Year is it? from my eldest son
"Most glaringly, you didn t start with CDC until summer of 1967, so your subtitle needs a slight modification. It was the summer of 67 that we moved from New York and lived on the farm. I remember very distinctly that I had just turned 7 and just finished first grade when we packed up, put the cat in the car (always put a leash on the cat when letting him out for a potty break, it once took a *long* time to get him back into the car) and drove to the farm in Wisconsin. A GEMCO store had just burned down, with large loss of life due to lack of panic hardware on the doors which opened inward, not outward and for months the twisted scorched steel framework was visible from the freeway. We were in MN for two years (my 2nd and 3rd grades) and moved to California in the summer of 1969 (with a side trip to the World Expo in Spokane Washington, where we used our car to help a police officer block off a side street for the fireworks display and were rewarded by being able to be almost right under the display as fireworks debris rained down around us what fun).
...
"BTW: a few years ago I dropped by the Pike Lake house and found that all the yards are now fenced in. The view of the lake is different."

My reaction - Sad, just to keep the snow mobile folks from roaring through the back yards.

And from youngest son
"> It was the summer of 67 that we moved from New York and lived on the farm."
"Wow, that must have been quite a year. I was born in January of '67 in Phoenix, AZ. Dad, couldn't you stay still for 3 months? It's called 'settling down,' not 'driving your family from coast to coast to coast.' :-) "

My response
Guilty as charged :-((
In retrospect, sounds inconsiderate - Also Carl was born just after I finished GE-225 school in Phoenix, Arizona and had moved to Somersworth, New Hampshire. I was helping install the computer in Somersworth while Carl was being born in the local hospital. :-((

A Note
Various family members have kindly refreshed my never good memory for dates. :-))

July 2019 - Gary Vesperman CCed me on this letter to the Sempervirens Fund < redwoods@sempervirens.org >

We picked up stacks of line printer paper and boxes of punch cards that had been set outside offices by programmers. We then would take the carts out to the parking lot where we would throw the paper and punch cards into a large dumpster. When full the dumpster would be trucked and its tons of paper and cards sold to a paper recycling facility. I remember we were paid about $150 per ton of cards and about $30 a ton for the paper. The money was then donated to the Sempervirens Fund. The gentleman at the Fund at that time was Tony Look. He may no longer be with us. Over some years we donated thousands of dollars to buy land for Castle Rock and Big Basin parks. Anyway that is my story. I now live in Boulder City, Nevada.

Indeed - you reminded me to add an epilog to my CDC story -

Table of contents:
     - Dead Sales Office
     - Bill Norris resigns amongst sales and financial turmoil 1986
     - Even IBM had BIG troubles in this era 1990

Dead Sales Office - A word picture

A few years after leaving CDC as a lost cause - (1972) and happily at Measurex - I was curious about how the local CDC was doing - I went to the old Special Systems building - no one there knew of CDC Searching in the phone book White Pages, remember them? , I found a phone # and location of CDC in the San Jose area. At a small shopping center office, the front door propped open, It was fall, and the fallen leaves were blowing in the door. Inside the receptionist said this was the CDC office, but didn't know what CDC did. She said that if I waited a little while a salesman would be back and tell me -- I asked about the leaves blowing about - She said the janitor would remove them in the evening - - -

Bill Norris resigns amongst sales and financial turmoil
In hippy talk, this was "lifted" from the New York Times, when it might not have been so radical
Money equivalences - at the time the Minimum Wage in California was $3.35/hr - now $11/hr

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/11/business/an-era-ends-at-control-data.html AN ERA ENDS AT CONTROL DATA By Andrew Pollack, Special To the New York Times Jan. 11, 1986 About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. William C. Norris, a giant figure in the history of the computer industry, retired today as chairman and chief executive of the Control Data Corporation, a company he founded and headed for 29 years but which is now in a fight for its life. Robert M. Price, president and chief operating officer, was named to replace Mr. Norris. Mr. Price will also retain the title of president. Mr. Price faces ''an extremely arduous, demanding task'' in leading the ailing company, said Michael Geran, an analyst with E. F. Hutton. ''No one's ever restructured a $5 billion company in the computer industry like this before.'' The list of Control Data's problems seems endless. The company is in technical default on $383 million of short-term loans and is renegotiating with its banks. It is trying to sell some of its businesses to keep the remaining ones afloat. In the first three quarters of 1985 Control Data lost $270 million, largely from write-downs for discontinued businesses. Analysts expect more write-downs and losses in the fourth quarter that will bring the loss for the year to more than $400 million. The stock price has plummeted, and numerous shareholder suits have been filed. Six directors have resigned recently, three of them because the liability insurance for directors and officers was canceled. Despite all the troubles, analysts said there appears to be little danger that Control Data will actually go bankrupt. Neither do they expect drastic changes immediately from Mr. Price, who has been running day-to-day operations for several years. Still, they say he will have to act relatively quickly. With Mr. Norris gone, some believe changes are inevitable. ''Now that the chicken is dead, a lot of the chicks under the wings will be exposed to the winds of Minnesota,'' said one former executive. Mr. Price, who is 54 years old, is a mathematician by training and has been with the company since 1961. He said at a news conference at the company's headquarters outside Minneapolis that he is under no deadline pressure to resolve the problems. He said the company expects to reach a new agreement with its lenders ''in the relatively near future.'' He also said the company is close to selling its profitable Ticketron unit. Analysts have estimated the computerized ticketing operating could fetch $100 million to $200 million. Control Data has had trouble selling other units. It withdrew its Commercial Credit subsidiary from the market in June 1985 after failing to find a buyer, and its Gulf insurance unit has been on the block for almost two years. At the news conference, Mr. Price predicted that computer operations would be unprofitable for at least another year. But analysts think the company as a whole might be profitable in 1986 because of earnings from Commercial Credit. Mr. Norris, 74, said at the news conference that he was not forced out by the company's lenders but had simply decided it was time to turn over the reins. ''While I am pleased to report that I'm still in good health and have many personal goals to accomplish,'' he said, ''I am satisfied that Bob Price is now ready to provide the leadership the company needs in the years ahead.'' Mr. Norris will remain a director and was elected chairman emeritus. Mr. Norris has been a controversial figure in the computer industry, one who seems to have thousands of ideas but has had trouble carrying them them out. Much of the controversy around Mr. Norris involves his support of corporate programs to meet social needs. Control Data has built factories in slums and prisons, and has started projects to farm the Alaskan tundra, save small farms and develop wind power. The company has invested more than $1 billion to develop and market the computer-based education system known as Plato, which is only marginally profitable. Many of the social projects have failed, such as a program to lease cars to ex-convicts, which collapsed when some of the customers drove off without paying. Critics say the programs divert management's attention from the company's core businesses. On his last day in office, Mr. Norris defended his decisions and said they were always done for business reasons, not merely for social welfare. He called Plato his greatest contribution. ''Unfortunately,'' he said, ''the world can't grasp the importance of Plato's computer-based education.'' Mr. Price seemed to suggest that Control Data would now scale back some of the social projects because the company could no longer afford them, not because the company does not believe in them. Mr. Norris, who grew up on a Nebraska farm, helped start Control Data in 1957 after he and colleagues left the company that is now the Sperry Corporation. To get started, the company sold its stock directly to the public without using an underwriter, a highly unusual tactic. Control Data achieved early success with a brilliant engineer named Seymour Cray who built high-speed computers for scientific uses. I.B.M. was caught so off-guard that its chairman at the time, Thomas J. Watson Jr., complained in a 1963 memo that I.B.M. had ''lost our industry leadership position'' in high-speed computing to a company whose laboratory employed ''only 34 people, including the janitor.'' Diversification Moves Control Data eventually decided to diversify and began making disk and tape drives for other computer companies. The company also went into other businesses such as providing computer time to customers who did not own computers. But the company may have carried diversification too far. It now has 170 businesses, a mix that has proved difficult to manage. In supercomputers, Control Data has fallen way behind Cray Research Inc., a company founded by Seymour Cray. Last year, Cray shipped almost 30 machines, compared with fewer than 10 for Control Data. Other areas have troubles, too. Computer services has suffered as customers switch to using their own personal computers rather than sharing time on a mainframe. Commercial Credit, while profitable, has long operated below industry norms. It is now concentrating on consumer finance in the South and East. The biggest challenge, however, is in the peripherals business - once the largest source of profits and now the biggest money loser. Control Data was blindsided by competition from Japan and from American start-up companies. Its worldwide market share for disk drives plummeted from 55 percent in 1980 to probably less than 20 percent in 1985, according to Disk/Trend Inc., a market research firm. ''We expected that to change but didn't expect the rate of change that occurred in technology or competition,'' said Marvin G. Rogers, Control Data's chief financial officer. The company is now slimming its product line. Revenues from peripherals are expected to decline by a third, to a little more than $1 billion in 1985 from nearly $1.5 billion in 1984, according to Mr. Rogers. The company's troubles are a source of sadness to old-timers in the industry, said James N. Porter, president of Disk/Trend. ''There's a feeling of remorse and of complete incredulity that it's been allowed to go as far as it has,'' he said.

Even IBM had BIG troubles in this era 1990
from https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1990.html

During the 1980s and early 1990s, IBM was thrown into turmoil by back-to-back revolutions. The PC revolution placed computers directly in the hands of millions of people. And then, the client/server revolution sought to link all of those PCs (the "clients") with larger computers that labored in the background (the "servers" that served data and applications to client machines). Both revolutions transformed the way customers viewed, used and bought technology. And both fundamentally rocked IBM. Businesses' purchasing decisions were put in the hands of individuals and departments - not the places where IBM had long-standing customer relationships. Piece-part technologies took precedence over integrated solutions. The focus was on the desktop and personal productivity, not on business applications across the enterprise. By 1993, the company's annual net losses reached a record $8 billion. Cost management and streamlining became a chief concern. And IBM considered splitting its divisions into separate independent businesses.