Roots In Innovation
This year Datacard Group is celebrating its 40th anniversary. But its roots in technical innovation reach much further back than 1969.
The story truly begins during World War Two, when a group of talented engineers were working on a number of top secret projects for the Navy including important code breaking initiatives.
Drum Memory SystemAfter the end of the war, the engineers stayed together to form a technical consulting group called Engineering Research Associates. Notable members of ERA included technology pioneers William Norris and Seymour Cray, along with Datacard’s founder, Willis K. Drake. ERA was known for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems.
Control Data's First Computer System,the CDC 1604
In 1957, Norris, Cray, Drake and financier Bud Ryden made their next big impact on modern computing technology when they launched Control Data Corporation. Control Data is widely credited with developing the world’s first super computer and eventually spawned Cray Research. As Control Data’s first Marketing Director, Willis Drake helped influence many of their earliest innovations, including their first computer system, the CDC 1604.
Some years later Drake and Ryden returned to their entrepreneurial roots to form Midwest Technical Development Corporation, only the second Venture Capital group in the United States. MTDC invested heavily in the exploding electronics market. Their investments in National Semiconductor, Telex and other electronics innovators would foster many technological breakthroughs, including the Hard Disk Drive present in every personal computer today.
It was during this time that Drake saw the business opportunity that would become Datacard.