Control Data Corporation and Dad.

It starts with 2 pictures and some questions. You see, my mother has boxes upon boxes of old photos going back to the early 1900's of both her and my father's family, some after they got "off the boat" and some shots taken in "the old county." Neat stuff, if you are related. I am. You probably are not, so I will keep it as interesting as possible.

I would like to thank Christi's dad, Don, for digitizing a good bulk of them for us to archive. All of the following was found out because of Don's scans.

Here are the shots...

This is shot one, taken on what looks to be a very good quality camera. This web ready version of these shots does not really do them justice. My dad, Frank Aprigliano, is, well, the shorter one. They are standing in front of what looks like a card reader that says Control Data - Transactor. And the guy who is not my father is smoking a cigar, around computer equipment - welcome to the 1960's. Before we had hard drives we had magnetic tape, and before we had that we had cards to hold various information. If you are older than 55 then you remember those cards that came with your electric bill that told you "DO NOT BEND." They held a small amount of information, probably your unique ID, and you sent them back to CON ED with your $10 check for electricity. Gas and food were cheaper, too, according to the book The way things were and why we liked them better, by Ima Olfart. But I digress...



And this is shot two. At first glance it looks like a line feed printer, labeled Control Data 3010, and I still think it is, because I cannot find anything to the contrary. I have come to learn that Control Data was trying to perfect OCR (optical character recognition) so there is the possibility that this could be an OCR. OCR in the 1960's? Cool. I do not know how posed this shot is, guys on the phone, probably taking with tech support in India, and tech support, "Bob," is asking "Is it plugged in?" My Dad is in the middle. And there is a guy leaning on it, smoking a Lucky. That is so 1960's. Where are the Martini's?

I would like to point out that the previous two photos are released into the Creative Commons specifically for historical reasons if you have need.

So there you have the 2 shots. I do not know exactly when they were taken or even what year. Enter Google. Time to geek out.

I found the following line here about Control Data Corporation
"1966 - ...CDC gains a $22.7 million contract from United States Post Office for the Postal Source Data System... "

Hmm... My father worked for the post office. And I remember my mother saying that he did not want to go to a training in Minneapolis, the headquarters of Control Data, so they sent a trainer to his post office. So now we have an approximate year. 1966. I cannot assume which computer the shots were attached to but there are two possibilities, the 6400 and the 6600. Since the 6400 was released in 1966, I would assume that the U.S. Post Office would only get the latest, although that is only a guess on my part.

Well, there is so much more information out there about Control Data Corporation, but if you know who the other folks are in the pictures, leave a comment or send me an email. I would love to work that info into this post.

One last piece of "We have come a long way." I just spent about $400 on four gigs of memory at NewEgg for my Mac Mini and Christel's new Lenovo. They they fit in the palm of my hand and hold 1 gig per stick. And then there is, or was, this...


This is 4k of memory. From MUSEUM "WAALSDORP." Take that Mr. Ima Olefart.


The following are some good links if you want to Read on...

WikiPedia on Control Data Corporation
CDC brochures from ComputerHist0ry.Org
6400/6500/6600 Reference Manual (real fun read!)