Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry
About this ebook
Drawing on rare archival documents, photographs, and a wealth of oral histories, Digital State unveils the remarkable story of computer development in the heartland after World War II. These decades found corporations—concentrated in large part in Minnesota—designing state-of-the-art mainframe technologies, revolutionizing new methods of magnetic data storage, and, for the first time, truly integrating software and hardware into valuable products for the American government and public. Minnesota-based companies such as Engineering Research Associates, Univac, Control Data, Cray Research, Honeywell, and IBM Rochester were major international players and together formed an unrivaled epicenter advancing digital technologies. These companies not only brought vibrant economic growth to Minnesota, they nurtured the state’s present-day medical device and software industries and possibly even tomorrow’s nanotechnology.
Thomas J. Misa’s groundbreaking history shows how Minnesota recognized and embraced the coming information age through its leading-edge companies, its workforce, and its prominent institutions. Digital State reveals the inner workings of the birth of the digital age in Minnesota and what we can learn from this era of sustained innovation.
About the author
Thomas J. Misa is Engineering Research Associates Land Grant Chair of the History of Technology in the Program for History of Science and Technology and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as director of the Charles Babbage Institute, at the University of Minnesota. He has written or edited nine books, including Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing and Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present.
