18 Apr
2011
18 Apr
'11
12:10 a.m.
On 17 Apr 2011 at 23:01, Brent Hilpert wrote:
Sounds like somebody got a little happy with bags of
excess cash. I
knew CDC was doing well in that era, but not that well.
Government sales was very good to CDC. I heard it mentioned that if
CDC had a new high-end processor, they automatically assumed that
FNWC (Fleet Numeric Weather Control in Monterey) would buy at least
one.
I remember that office correspondence during the late 60's / early
70's was all typed on typewriters with the really ugly OCR-A font
installed, evidently out of the vision of automating corporate
paperwork through OCR because of some early machine-reader firm that
was aquired. Eventually, the ugly typewriters were jettisoned.
Some good stuff and some hair-brained stuff came when CDC got SBC out
of the IBM lawsuit. It's hard to imagine that any firm would have
no clue of what to do with a coast-to-coast network of computer
systems, but there you go. Control Data Institute, the PLATO
education effort, Tickettron, and a bunch of very strange ventures
came out of the attempt to use the capability.
Commercial Credit was another late 60's acquisition (I guess it
evolved into Citicorp). If you were relocating, CCC handled your
home sale and financing. You could even deposit money in a CCC
account for better-than-market rates.
One thing that CDC had in abundance was Vice Presidents. At one
point, I remember counting 128 of them.
--Chuck