Control Data Corporation - ETA Systems, Magnetic Peripherals, Wind-down and Sale of Assets

ETA Systems, Magnetic Peripherals, Wind-down and Sale of Assets

CDC decided to fight for the high-performance niche, but Norris recognized that the company had become moribund in his opinion and unable to quickly design competitive machines. So in 1983, he set up a spinoff company, ETA Systems, whose design goal was a machine processing data at 10 GFLOPs, about 40 times the speed of the Cray-1. The design never fully matured, and it was unable to reach its goals. Nevertheless, the product was one of the fastest computers on the market, and 7 liquid nitrogen-cooled and 27 smaller air cooled versions of the computers were sold during the next few years. They used the new CMOS chips, which produced much less heat. The effort ended after half-hearted attempts to sell ETA Systems. In 1989, most of the employees of ETA Systems were laid off, and the remaining ones were folded into CDC.

Meanwhile, several very large Japanese manufacturing firms were entering the market. The supercomputer market was too small to support more than a handful of companies, so CDC started looking for other markets. One of these was the high-performance hard disk drive market, which was becoming more lucrative as personal computers (PCs) began to include them in the mid-1980s. Through its Magnetic Peripherals unit, originally a joint venture with Honeywell and Honeywell Bull, CDC became a major player in the hard disk drive market. It was the world wide leader in 14 inch disk drive technology in the OEM marketplace in the 1970s and early 1980s especially with its SMD (Storage Module Drive) and CMD (Cartridge Module Drive), with its plant at Brynmawr in the South Wales valleys running 24/7 production. The Magnetic Peripherals division in Brynmawr celebrated the production of 1 million disks and 3 million magnetic tapes in October 1979. CDC was an early developer of the eight-inch drive technology that was pioneered by Shugart Associates with products from its MPI Oklahoma City Operation. Its CDC Wren series drives were particularly popular with "high end" users, although it was behind the capacity growth and performance curves of numerous startups such as Micropolis, Atasi, Maxtor, and Quantum. CDC also co-developed the now universal Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) interface with Compaq and Western Digital, which was aimed at lowering the cost of adding low-performance drives. CDC founded a separate division called Rigidyne in Simi Valley, California, to develop 3.5-inch drives using technology from the Wren series. These were marketed by CDC as the "Swift" series, and were some of the first high-performance 3.5-inch drives on the market at their introduction in 1987.

Despite having valuable technology, CDC still suffered from huge losses in 1985 and 1986 while attempting to reorganize. As a result, in 1987 it sold its PathLab Laboratory Information System to 3M. While CDC was still making computers, it was decided that hardware manufacturing was no longer as profitable as it used to be, and so in 1988, the decision to leave the industry, bit by bit, was made. The first divisions to go were MPI and Rigidyne; in September 1988, CDC merged the two divisions into the umbrella subsidiary of Imprimis Technology, with the intent to sell the entire operation. The next year, Seagate Technology, which had been seriously lagging in the high-end drive market, purchased Imprimis. After that, CDC sold other assets such as VTC (a chip maker that specialized in mass-storage circuitry and was closely linked with MPI), as well as non-computer-related assets like Ticketron. Finally, in 1992, the computer hardware and service businesses were spun out as Control Data Systems, Inc. (CDS). In 1999, CDS was bought out by Syntegra (USA), a subsidiary of the BT Group, and merged into BT's Global Services organization.

CDC's Energy Management Division was one of the most successful CDC business units, providing control systems solutions that managed as much as 25% of all electricity on the planet. In 1988 or 1989 this division was renamed Empros and was later sold to Siemens as CDC broke apart.

Finally, after the CDS spinout, all that was left of CDC was its services business, and it became known as the Ceridian Corporation. Ceridian continues as a successful outsourced IT company focusing on human resources. In 1997 General Dynamics acquired the Computing Devices International Division of Ceridian. Computing Devices, headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota, was a defense electronics and systems integration business, originally Control Data's Government Systems Division.