Quote: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, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well-known and highly regarded throughout the industry at the time. For most of the 1960s, Seymour Cray worked at CDC and developed a series of machines that were the fastest computers in the world by far, until Cray left the company to found Cray Research (CRI) in the 1970s. After several years of losses in the early 1980s, in 1988 CDC started to leave the computer manufacturing business and sell the related parts of the company, a process that was completed in 1992 with the creation of Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining businesses of CDC currently operate as Ceridian.

During World War II the U.S. Navy had built up a classified team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery for both Japanese and German electro-mechanical ciphers. A number of these were produced by a team dedicated to the task working in the Washington, D.C., area. With the post-war wind-down of military spending, the Navy grew increasingly worried that this team would break up and scatter into various companies, and it started looking for ways to keep the code-breaking team together.

Eventually they found their solution: John Parker, the owner of a Chase Aircraft affiliate named Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation located in St. Paul, Minnesota, was about to lose all his contracts due to the ending of the war. The Navy never told Parker exactly what the team did, since it would have taken too long to get top secret clearance.

The result was Engineering Research Associates (ERA). Formed in 1946, this contract engineering company worked on a number of seemingly unrelated projects in the early 1950s. Among these was the ERA Atlas, an early military stored program computer, the basis of the Univac 1101, which was followed by the 1102, and then the 36-bit ERA 1103 (UNIVAC 1103). The Atlas was built for the Navy, which intended to use it in their non-secret code-breaking centers. In the early 1950s a minor political debate broke out in Congress about the Navy essentially "owning" ERA, and the ensuing debates and legal wrangling left the company drained of both capital and spirit. In 1952, Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand.

Although Rand kept the ERA team together and developing new products, it was most interested in ERA's magnetic drum memory systems. Rand soon merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand.

Since the Sperry "big company" mentality encroached on the decision-making powers of the ERA employees, a number left Sperry to form the Control Data Corp. in Sept 1957, setting up shop in an old warehouse across the river from Sperry's St. Paul laboratory, in Minneapolis at 501 Park Avenue. Of the members forming CDC, William Norris was the unanimous choice to become the chief executive officer of the new company. Seymour Cray soon became the chief designer, though at the time of CDC's formation he was still in the process of completing a prototype for the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS), and he did not leave Sperry to join CDC until it was complete. The M-460 was Seymour's first transistor computer, though the power supply rectifiers were still tubes.

In 1959, CDC released a 48-bit transistorized version of their re-design of the 1103 re-design under the name CDC 1604; the first machine was delivered to the U.S. Navy in 1960 at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address (501 Park Avenue) to Cray's former project, the ERA-Univac 1103.

Quote:16th October 1959 - CDC Introduces 1604 Computer

Control Data Corp. released its model 1604 computer, the first in the line from the company formed by a group that left Sperry Rand Corp., led by William Norris. The 1604 was the most powerful computer in its day, designed by Seymour Cray, who would go on to a career in building supercomputers. Applications of the CDC 1604 included processing data in real time, controlling weapons systems, solving large-scale scientific problems, and commercial applications.

Quote:KGB Or CIA?

Jobs told U.S. Defense Department investigators in 1988 that during his trip to the Soviet Union he dealt with an international lawyer he felt “either worked for the CIA or the KGB.” These were among the details in a Pentagon background check -- a copy of which was obtained by Wired magazine in 2012 under the Freedom of Information Act -- that Jobs was subjected to for Top Secret security clearance. The name of the lawyer is redacted in the publicly released document, though it cites the Apple co-founder as saying the individual was from Paris and “helped communication between the United States and the Soviet Union.” Jobs noted, however, that he had no evidence of the man's potential ties to intelligence.
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The Mac Revolution

Prior to arriving in Moscow for his two-day trip in early July, Jobs attended a Paris trade show, where then-U.S. Vice President George Bush encouraged him to get computers into Russia in order to "foment revolution from below,” author Walter Isaacson writes in his authorized 2011 biography, Steve Jobs. Merin confirms to RFE/RL that during their Moscow meeting, Jobs told him of this conversation with Bush, as well.

Jobs had already been stripped of major responsibilities at Apple amid the company’s flagging sales. Months later, he would resign as Apple chairman, only to return more than a decade later and launch the series of products, including the iPhone and iPad, that would revolutionize consumer electronics.

Jobs “had pitched [Bush] this idea, which was to try and get Macs throughout the Soviet Union, because if the Soviets had them, the Russian people had it, there would be the possibility of newsletters, and printing things, fomenting revolution, and, you know, all this stuff that would help the United States,” Merin tells RFE/RL.
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A Trotskyite Abroad

While in Moscow, Isaacson writes in his biography, Jobs “insisted on talking about” Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader later forced into exile as an “enemy of the people” and assassinated in Mexico on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s orders. Isaacson writes that a “KGB agent” who was assigned to Jobs during the trip suggested the Apple chairman “tone down his fervor.”

“You don’t want to talk about Trotsky,” the agent is quoted as saying. “Our historians have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a great man anymore.”

Isaacson writes that this only made Jobs more eager to discuss the revolutionary.

“When they got to the state university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising Trotsky,” he writes.
The Soviet Adventures Of Steve Jobs

Quote:He became a citizen of the United States by an act of Congress and had homes in New York and Paris. The French government made him a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and an Officer of Arts and Letters. The Polish government made him a Commander of the Order of Merit.
Samuel Pisar Dies at 86; Lawyer and Adviser Survived Nazi Camps (NYT, July 28, 2015)

Quote:Blinken attended the Dalton School in New York City until 1971. He then moved to Paris with his mother Judith and Samuel Pisar, whom she married following her divorce from Blinken. In his confirmation hearing, Blinken told the story of his stepfather, who was the only Holocaust survivor of the 900 children of his school in Poland. Pisar found refuge in a U.S. tank after making a break into the forest during a Nazi death march. In Paris, Blinken attended École Jeannine Manuel.
Wiki Blinken

Quote:After President Richard Nixon initiated détente, Control Data, by its own account, became the dominant supplier of large systems to “socialist bloc markets.” It built factories in Romania and Yugoslavia, signed a path-breaking cooperative agreement with the Soviet Union’s State Committee on Science and Technology, and penetrated China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The gains that this strategy generated for CDC (estimated to be about $30 million a year by 1977) were counterbalanced by significant risks. The firm’s export license applications were subject to the whims of broader U.S. foreign policy; they benefited, for example, when U.S. leaders sought to “triangulate” between the Soviet Union and China, and they suffered when U.S. officials sought to prove their toughness.

Norris ultimately came to see expanded East-West trade as a distinct objective of his firm, tantamount to pursuing a private foreign policy intended to nurture peaceful relations between capitalism and communism. He even envisioned a joint enterprise that married the genius of American marketing to the brainpower of Russian scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, the kind of venture that only came to fruition with the collapse of Soviet communism in the 1990s. This visionary, risk-taking impulse distinguished Norris from his peers. The safest course for a firm that depended heavily on a U.S. military and intelligence clientele would have been to cater assiduously to those customers. Yet, he put some of that business at risk for the much less certain, but potentially more fulfilling payoff of “building the business bridge between the Communist world and the west.”

Control Data never eschewed military contracts, and my research does not provide evidence of a direct influence of the peace movement on Norris. Yet peace was in the air in the Twin Cities. Minnesota’s Senator Eugene McCarthy drove Johnson out of the 1968 presidential race; South Dakota’s Senator George McGovern carried the flag for the Democrats in 1972. Norris’s private ruminations suggest that he hoped for a withering away of the national security state that saw CDC through its infancy and that corporate diplomacy of the sort that he practiced could have a hand in that process. In this respect, he had more in common with the hippies and libertarians who helped to create the personal computer industry in California—and who despised the big systems approach epitomized by CDC—than those rebels might have liked to acknowledge.

Quote:Consider Multi-Arc Vacuum Systems Inc., of St. Paul, Minn., which markets a Soviet-developed process for coating metals. The process was "discovered" in the late 1970s when Joseph Filner -- president of Noblemet International (now Newmet Corp.) of New York City -- stumbled across it during a business trip to the Soviet Union. There he learned about a Russian auto plant that had had difficulties getting new machine tools when it needed them. Searching for ways to alleviate the problem, workers had found that a thin film of titanium nitride enabled them to work their old tools longer, harder, and faster.

Filner visited the plant and, in December 1979, negotiated a U.S. license for the technology. On the strength of that license, Noblemet and other investors launched Multi-Arc as a joint venture to sell the coating machines and related services. In just over two years, the company's annual revenues grew from zero to $5 million. Multi-Arc now has 80 employees, recently set up a british subsidiary, and is about to begin licensing a service operation. Ironically, the process -- invented in a Russian auto factory -- has proven most popular among tool makers supplying the U.S. auto industry. "It's an impressive, rapidly growing, successful business," says Jack Heule, president of Minneapolis-based Control Data Worldtech Inc., a division of Control Data Corp that does research and consulting on, and brokering of, technology transfers. Worldtech is now a worldwide marketing reprrsentative for Multi-Arc.

Quote:H. Joseph Filner was a prominent communist, turned industrialist.

Divorced from his first wife, Sarah F. Filner, Joseph Filner was survived by his wife of 47 years, Doris. He was the father of congressman Bob Filner, Dr. Bernard Filner, a Maryland physician who specializes in pain medicine, a stepdaughter Nancy Stein who is associated with the Little Red School House of New York, and five grandchildren.

Joseph Filner was a close friend and business associate of secret Communist Party USA member, Stanley Levison.

In 1990 Joseph Filner, an international trader based in New York, was described "marketing Soviet products in the West for 35 years".

Filner created a charitable foundation, the Frieda Foundation, through which he gave to many leftist causes, especially programs to "rid the world of the threat of nuclear annihilation."

Joseph Filner, the president of Project Development International, said a metal-coating process then being marketed in the United States by Multi-Arc Vacuum Systems Inc. of St. Paul had originally been developed for the Soviet nuclear program. The process increases the life of cutting tools like drills and mills as much as sixfold by depositing a thin layer of titanium nitride on the surface.

Researchers in the United States knew the advantages of titanium nitride, but the temperature of the process they had developed, more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, was so high that many of the tools became deformed, limiting their usefulness. Meanwhile, Soviet scientists had found a way to apply the coating at 800 to 900 degrees. We found they had better technology, so we bought it and brought it back to this country, Mr. Filner said. The treated tools, recognizable by the golden coating, are now widely used in American industry, including in military plants, and are beginning to turn up in consumer markets, Product Development officials said.
Joseph Filner (KeyWiki, a bipartisan knowledge base focusing primarily on corruption and the covert side of politics in the United States and globally.)

Quote:The Bob Filner Biography the Left Wants to Hide (July 1, 2012)

It occured to me that even many of my knowledgeable allies are not fully familiar with the historical degree of affiliation Bob Filner has with socialist and communist organizations. His background speaks for itself.

Below is a comprehensive summary of Filner’s red-tinted political affinity for collectivist, tyrannical government. It’s clearly a biased piece, but that does not mean it is inaccurate. Many links are provided, and similar summaries are available with a Google search. As the chain letters say, “share this with others” (the author encourages such sharing).

Quote:Journalist Charged With Threatening Terrorism (May 14, 1986)

ATHENS, Greece (AP) A journalist on Wednesday filed a libel suit against the publisher of Greece’s largest newspaper, adding another twist to a three-year-old legal battle involving allegations that the journalist is a CIA spy and the newspaper is controlled by the Soviet KGB.

Paul Anastasiades, an Athens-based correspondent for The New York Times and the London Daily Telegraph, sued the publisher, editor and three staff members of the left-leaning daily Ethnos with defamation of character and perjury.

Last week, the Athens prosecutor charged Anastasiades, who writes under the name Paul Anastasi, with threatening terroristic acts against Ethnos.

The dispute began in 1983 when Anastasiades published a book entitled ″Take the Nation in Your Hands.″ In the book, he alleged that the newspaper was published in cooperation with the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, and described publisher George Bobolas and editor Alecos Filippopoulos as ″agents of Soviet influence.″

Bobolas sued and Anastasiades was convicted of libel. He was sentenced to two years in prison, but released pending appeal. An appeals court annulled the sentence in 1984 on a legal technicality.

The case took another twist when Ethnos published excerpts of wiretapped telephone conversations between Anastasiades and an Athens lawyer in July 1983, shortly after the book was published.

The newspaper alleged that Anastasiades was a CIA agent and said the telephone conversations indicated he planned to murder employees of the newspaper, destroy the premises and destabilize democracy in Greece. The excerpts did not appear to support the charges.

In April 1984, Bobolas and Filippopoulos each were sentenced to five months in jail for using illegally acquired wiretaps, and have appealed. They were acquitted of charges they actually made the tap on Anastasiades’ phone at the New York Times office in Athens.

Quote:The lost future of Gorbachev's visit to Minnesota

When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited the Twin Cities on June 3, 1990, it represented a coup for local political and business leaders — namely Gov. Rudy Perpich, who had requested that Gorbachev stop in Minnesota on his way to California, and William C. Norris, founder of Control Data Corp.

Gorbachev had just concluded a three-day summit in Washington with President George H.W. Bush. One signed agreement called for the elimination of most chemical weapons in both nations' arsenals. "The world has waited long enough. The Cold War must end," Bush said at the joint news conference.
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Importantly, the Soviet leader visited the Bloomington headquarters of Control Data. The company was in the process of selling several super computers (valued about $32 million) to the Soviet Union for the expressed purpose of nuclear power plant operations and safety. The Chernobyl disaster four years earlier had highlighted the archaic nature of most Soviet-era technology as well as the promise of commercial ties between the two nations.

Quote:Global Research Institute Announced During Gorbachev Visit (AP, June 4, 1990)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell is putting up $50 million to help establish a global research center named for Mikhail Gorbachev.

The $100 million Gorbachev Maxwell Institute of Technology was announced Sunday during the Soviet president’s visit to Minnesota. The institute will mix U.S., Soviet and European scientists and will be in the Twin Cities.

It will cope with issues ″that matter to humanity,″ such as environmental warming, communications, health and food, Maxwell said.

The remaining $50 million is to be raised by Gov. Rudy Perpich and a committee of Minnesotans.

Quote:At about 2:30 the Gorbachevs entered the governor’s mansion for lunch. Almost half of the 50 guests were Soviet officials, including Alexander Bessmertnikh, the new ambassador to the U.S., and several of Gorbachev’s key advisors, among them Anatoly Chernyaev, Evgenii Primakov, and Stanislav Shatalin. Members of the Perpich family, British publisher Robert Maxwell, Minnesota corporate leaders close to the governor, U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock, and other Washington officials, including Dr. Condoleezza Rice, then a little-known National Security Council staff member, rounded out the party.

Quote:IN U.S., GORBACHEV TRIED TO SELL A DREAM (WaPo, June 6, 1990)
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"I think Gorbachev got to us," said John Sculley, head of Apple Computers Inc. "We'll all be thinking about business with the Soviet Union in a way we wouldn't have if he hadn't come." The quintessential California endorsement of the Soviet sales pitch came from Bill Transbart, a young man in granny grasses who sold T-shirts reading, "Gorbachev: Radical Dude."

The well-fed faces and tailored suits in Gorbachev's audiences were like something out of the old Bolshevik propaganda posters decrying the "greedy money-grubbers" of the capitalist west -- Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, free-market economist Milton Friedman, the CEOs of 3M, IBM, MTS, IDS, IBP and AT&T.

But Gorbachev turned the old enmities into modern seduction. He spoke an idealized businessman's language. The notion of of socialism never drew more than a perfunctory whisper. Instead of Lenin, he invoked the names of Alexander Herzen and Andrei Sakharov, Russian intellectuals who looked west. The idea was to entice, to seduce and damn the ideological consequences.

(11-24-2022, 11:06 AM)BIAD Wrote:
Everyone is involved.