William Charles Norris (July 14, 1911 near

Red Cloud, Nebraska Red Cloud is a city in and the county seat of Webster County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 962 at the 2020 census. History The region of present-day Red Cloud was intermittently occupied and used as hunting grounds by the Pawnee ...

– August 21, 2006) was an American business executive. He was the

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...

, 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 The term ''inner city'' has been used, especially in the United States, as a euphemism for majority-minority lower-income residential districts that often refer to rundown neighborhoods, in a downtown or city centre area. Sociologists somet ...

and disadvantaged communities.

Early life

Norris was born and raised on a

cattle Cattle (''Bos taurus'') are large, domesticated, cloven-hooved, herbivores. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus ''Bos''. Adult females are referred to as cows and adult mal ...

farm in Nebraska, attending a tiny school in

Inavale, Nebraska Inavale is a census-designated place in western Webster County, Nebraska, United States. Description The community lies along U.S. Route 136, west of the city of Red Cloud, the county seat A county seat is an administrative center, seat ...

and operating a

ham radio Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of the radio frequency spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emergency communic ...

. He attained a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska in 1932. He spent two years on his family's farm after graduation, helping weather the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

and a significant drought in the Midwest by risking the use of

Russian thistle Russian thistle is a common name that can refer to: * ''Echinops exaltatus'', also known as ''Russian globe thistle'', is a globe thistle native to Eurasia and an invasive species in Eastern Canada and Northern United States. * ''Kali tragus'', fo ...

as cattle feed.

Military career

Norris served in the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

as a codebreaker, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander while working at the Navy's

Nebraska Avenue Complex Nebraska Avenue Complex (also called NAC), located at 3801 Nebraska Avenue NW in, Washington D.C. It was the former headquarters of the Mount Vernon Seminary and the Navy Communication Security Section and other U.S. military organizations. Cu ...

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

His technical accomplishments included advancing methods for identifying

U-boats U-boats were naval submarines operated by Germany, particularly in the First and Second World Wars. Although at times they were efficient fleet weapons against enemy naval warships, they were most effectively used in an economic warfare rol ...

Professional career

Before entering military service, Norris sold X-Ray equipment for the Westinghouse Corporation in Chicago, then worked for the

Bureau of Ordnance The Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) was a United States Navy organization, which was responsible for the procurement, storage, and deployment of all naval weapons, between the years 1862 and 1959. History Congress established the Bureau in the Departmen ...

as a civil servant engineer until signing with the Naval Reserve. Norris entered the computer business just after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, when along with

Howard Engstrom Howard T. Engstrom (1902 – 1962) was a Yale University mathematics professor and headed research operations at the United States Navy's Communication Supplementary Activities CSAW during World War II. Along with William Norris and others he f ...

and other

US Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage of ...

cryptographer Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

s he formed

Engineering Research Associates Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. ERA became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were ev ...

(ERA) in January, 1946 to build scientific computers. He hired forty of the members of his codebreaking team and set up shop in a glider factory with Northwestern Aeronautical, a major government contractor. ERA was fairly successful, but in the early 1950s a lengthy series of government probes into "Navy funding" drained the company and it was sold to

Remington Rand Remington Rand was an early American business machine manufacturer, originally a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers. Formed in 1927 following a merger, Remington Rand wa ...

. 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 UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...

. This resulted in most of ERA's work being dropped. As a result, several employees left and set up Control Data, unanimously selecting Norris as president. Control Data started by selling magnetic

drum memory Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory. For many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory ...

systems to other computer manufacturers, but introduced their own mainframe, the

CDC 1604 The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation (CDC). The 1604 is known as one of the first commercially successful transistorized computers. (The IBM 7090 was delivered e ...

, in 1958. Designed primarily by

Seymour Cray Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996
) was an American

CDC 6600 The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM ...

, the first

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

, and CDC was suddenly in the leadership position with a machine ten times faster than anything on the market. This was a significant threat to IBM's business, and they quickly started a project of their own to take back the performance crown from CDC. In the meantime they announced an advanced version of the

IBM System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...

, called the

ACS-1 The ACS-1 and ACS-360 are two related supercomputers designed by IBM as part of the IBM ''Advanced Computing Systems'' project from 1961 to 1969. Although the designs were never finished and no models ever went into production, the project spawned ...

, that was to be faster than the 6600. However, the machine didn't yet exist, and after carefully documenting sales lost to the IBM project, Norris launched a massive lawsuit against them in 1968. IBM was unable to finish its "6600 killer," and CDC eventually won the suit, and was awarded $600 million in damages. In 1967 Norris attended a seminar for CEOs where

Whitney Young Whitney Moore Young Jr. (July 31, 1921 – March 11, 1971) was an American civil rights leader. Trained as a social worker, he spent most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States and turning the National Urban ...

, head of the

National Urban League The National Urban League, formerly known as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, is a nonpartisan historic civil rights organization based in New York City that advocates on behalf of economic and social justice for African Am ...

, spoke about the social and economic injustices in the lives of young black Americans. This speech, along with a summer of violence in Norris's hometown of

Minneapolis Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins ...

, 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. Another CDC project that Norris championed was the

PLATO system Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...

, an

online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" or ...

teaching and instruction system developed at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

. The university developed most of the system on a CDC-1604 machine driving graphics

terminal Terminal may refer to: Computing Hardware * Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together * Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line * Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output dev ...

s 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 education market. Norris continually purchased new companies to fold into CDC, and eventually returned to the peripheral market in the 1970s. This move proved particularly wise. During the early 1970s, Seymour Cray left to form his own company, which quickly drove CDC out of its leadership position in the supercomputer market. This left CDC in second place in a market for a small number of machines. Soon large

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

ese companies were gobbling up what Cray didn't. CDC tried to regain its footing in the supercomputer market by spinning off

ETA Systems Eta (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἦτα ''ē̂ta'' or ell, ήτα ''ita'' ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative in most dialects, ...

, 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. In the 1980s CDC was left primarily as a

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

manufacturer, and their series of

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

drives were particularly successful. But at this point the rest of the company crashed, and the board started pressuring 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 subsequently retired in January 1986. His successor as Control Data CEO was

Robert M. Price Robert McNair Price (born July 7, 1954) is an American New Testament scholar. His most notable stance is arguing in favor of the Christ myth theorythe claim that a historical Jesus did not exist. Price is the author of a number of books on bi ...

. William Norris died on August 21, 2006 in a nursing home in

Bloomington, Minnesota Bloomington is a suburban city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, on the north bank of the Minnesota River, above its confluence with the Mississippi River, south of downtown Minneapolis. As of the 2020 census, the city's population was 89,987, ma ...

after a long battle with

Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms usually emerge slowly, and as the disease worsens, non-motor symptoms becom ...

. He was survived by his wife Jane Malley Norris, eight children, sons William, George, Daniel, Brian, Roger and David, and daughters Constance Van Hoven and Mary Keck, 21 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

References

Bibliography

* *

External links

William Norris: Computer Pioneer, Maverick Social Activist

* accessed August 23, 2006
Oral history interview with William C. Norris

, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
William C. Norris Papers, 1946-1988

, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Control Data Corporation Records, William C. Norris Executive Papers, 1946-1995

, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. {{DEFAULTSORT:Norris, William 1911 births 2006 deaths Deaths from Parkinson's disease Control Data Corporation American chief executives National Medal of Technology recipients People from Red Cloud, Nebraska Neurological disease deaths in Minnesota United States Navy officers