"I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world's most powerful computer," IBM's president Thomas J. Watson noted in a memo after Control Data had unveiled its 6600 system. Sparked by a highly creative and productive staff in a small, low-budget Wisconsin laboratory, CDC had indeed scooped Big Blue in 1963, only to turn around 5 years later and file a lawsuit against IBM claiming unfair competitive practices.
This is just one of the intriguing anecdotes and insights making up this personal reminiscence that captures the computer industry at a time of great change and excitement. Lundstrom, who worked for Sperry Rand and then Control Data Corporation, shows how computers are built and how computer companies actually function.
He covers major developments and important people and talks freely about his own most exciting and ultimately devastating experience developing a magnetic ticketing system for TWA. He looks at the formation and growth of many new high-tech companies during this period. And he touches on the more serious subjects^® decision making, the effective and successful management of people and creative teams, and the loss of technological and manufacturing leads to competitors and to foreign countries.
Looking back from over thirty years of experience, Lundstrom shows why some development projects are losers from the start while others are sure winners: "The dynamics of the interpersonal relationships in an engineering development group are so obvious to an old-timer that he can almost sort out the winning from the losing projects by walking through the development area, looking around, and taking a deep breath."
Lundstrom points out how important the single brilliant designer can be to the outcome of a project and how often that designer remains unrecognized, "a management oversight comparable to leaving a multimil-lion dollar piece of capital equipment unused." He introduces us to a number of these brilliant and highly motivated people in this narrative, with the caveat that we have often failed to make the fullest use of our best people.
A Few Good Men from Univac is included in the series History of Computing, edited by Bernard Cohen and William Aspray.
This is one of a very few books that describe what went wrong as well as what went right. An excellent example of technology diffusion throughout an important geographical area—what happens to real people in real jobs. I didn't want to put it down!"
—Bernard Galler, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Associate Director of the Computing Center, University of Michigan
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