Technitrol, Inc. was incorporated on April 15, 1947, by John F. Koch, Jr., E. Stuart Eichert, Jr., Gordon Palmer, Jr., and T. K. Sharpless, as Technitrol Engineering Company. The corporation opened its doors to business on May 1st of the same year. The four founders provided the paid-in capital of $1,000. Their goal was to develop the new technology of high speed computation for military and industrial purposes. Prior to their full time work at Technitrol, Eichert, Koch, and Sharpless had been employed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, while Palmer had been Assistant Director of Research at International Register Company in Philadelphia.

Technitrol's first contract was to develop a small, low-cost radar to be used in tug boats and larger pleasure craft. However, because of new Federal Communications Commission regulations and increased costs, the project was never completed. In the summer of 1947, Sharpless and Koch became aware of the problems that commercial airlines was facing in making and recording reservations for passenger flights. On August 4, 1947 Koch and Sharpless met with representatives of American Airlines to discuss a computerized reservation system. Although American's representatives said that the airline would not pay Technitrol for development of the system, Sharpless recommended that Technitrol proceed at its own expense to develop a reservation system. A patent for Technitrol's “Reservisor” system was ultimately filed on May 26, 1948. In June of 1948 the “Reservisor” system developed at Technitrol was demonstrated to the representatives of American Airlines, however the airline declined to purchase the system.

On September 23, 1952, Technitrol recorded a patent for the Magnetic Data Storage System that it used in its development of the “Reservisor” system. The primary objective of this Magnetic Data Storage System was to provide a means by which remote terminals, i.e., an airline reservation desk, could quickly determine the availability (or non-availability) of seat reservations on a particular flight. To complete this reservation relevant data as to the number and flight were communicated to a centrally located storage unit. The appropriate storage register, either a length of magnetic tape or a sector of a magnetic disk, was selected, and the number of additional reservations desired was added to the previous total. Provided this new total did not exceed the number of available reservations, the total was stored back in the appropriate register for similar access in the future.

Two problems arose during the development stage of this system. The first involved a process of register selection, that is, a way to address a particular register so that the previously stored material could be easily accessed when desired. The other problem occurred when the system was interrupted, by a power failure. Since the counter, an electronic device, lost count when the power was cut off, it was necessary to provide an automatic reset feature in order to synchronize the counter and the clock disk. This system of addressing a register and providing a reset feature was the foundation of the Sharpless-Eichert patent.

However, during the 1940s, Engineering Research Associates (ERA) a St. Paul, Minnesota based firm, which was doing top secret research as part of the U.S. Navy's cryptographic program, had developed a similar system. Thus when Technitrol tried to license its invention, a bitter patent infringement suit resulted. In February 1986, the former patent attorney for Technitrol, donated the records generated by this litigation to the Hagley Museum and Library.

The records which surfaced during the Technitrol Suit provide a fascinating picture of the early history of the computer industry. Series I-III consists of documents that were collected by the Technitrol lawyers through the discovery process.

Series I documents the work done at the Harvard Computational Laboratory between 1948 and 1955. It contains two boxes of progress reports that trace the “Investigation for Design of Digital Calculating Machinery.” This project resulted in the production of Harvard's Mark IV computer.

Series II documents the history of Engineering Research Associates, a Minneapolis computer company that was working under contract for the United States Navy during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The documentation on ERA, which has always been shrouded in secrecy because of the company's involvement in the Navy's cryptographic program, is extremely interesting. These internal company memoranda and progress reports show that as early as 1943 the Navy had recognized that the computer with its ability to rapidly manipulate data streams was a natural tool for encoding and decoding messages. During the second World War the Navy sponsored research in this secret work. Its most successful unit was led by Commander Howard T. Engstrom, in peacetime a professor of mathematics at Yale and Lt. Commander William C. Norris, who had been a sales engineer for Westinghouse. In 1945 Norris and Engstrom went into business for themselves and with the encouragement of Navy Secretary James Forrestal, established Engineering Research Associates. They negotiated a cost-plus contract with the government and began recruiting engineers, physicists, and mathematicians to work on top secret computer projects. By 1946, ERA now based in St. Paul, Minnesota, had established itself as one of the most advanced computer companies in the world with a reputation for engineering genius. The records show that it was the first company to develop a stored program digital computer, The Atlas, which was completed in the fall of 1950. This machine contained 2700 vacuum tubes and 2385 crystal diodes. It ran 24 hours a day with only ten percent of the time being allotted for maintenance. However, ERA's connection with the government was soon to be broken by an expose in Drew Pearson's “Washington Merry-Go-Round”, Pearson charged that the founding of ERA and the awarding of its initial contracts represented a conflict of interest for Engstrom and Norris as these former Naval technical specialists had clearly taken advantage of their war-time government connections in order to set up a company for their own profit. By 1952, ERA's connection with the Navy had been broken as the company, under considerable economic and political pressure, merged with Sperry-Rand. However, five years later William Norris led his engineers back to Minnesota where they established the Control Data Corporation.

Series II of the Technitrol Suit Records traces the stormy history of Engineering Research Associates. This series contains laboratory notebooks; internal company memoranda, monthly and weekly progress reports on the Atlas computer project. This material is arranged by exhibit number which are listed in the order that they were submitted to the court.

Series III contains other background records that were assembled during the discovery proceedings. This series includes data on the Gun Direction Computer (1961) and the Minuteman D 17 Computer (1960-1970). Also included are records tracing the development of the ENIAC and EDVAC computer at the University of Pennsylvanis's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

Series IV are the Prior Art Files which contain documentation on John Atanasoff's ABC Computer, the Harvard Mark IV and the Eckert-Mauchly ENIAC and UNIVAC.

Series V is the court record which include trial transcripts - briefs, appeals, affidavits, depositions and related documents.

Copyright restrictions may apply.

Gift of Seymour Yutter

July 8, 1987

Processed by Michael H. Nash