Just as Minnesota farmers created a pioneering network of grassroots organizations that worked to increase family income and political power during the latter decades of the 19th century, Minnesotan teachers, engineers, and politicians united their state with computing networks starting in the 1960s, at a time when information technology was invisible to most Americans. Although computers proliferated in military, commercial, and university spaces—with several thousand in use by 1960—they functioned behind the scenes, processing checks for Bank of America, managing orders and inventories for Bethlehem Steel, and protecting against Russian airborne attacks.
The term “Silicon Valley” had yet to be coined, but in essence, Minnesota was the Silicon Valley of the Cold War. We forget this today, in part because Minnesota’s computing companies never sold to household consumers, instead providing gigantic, multimillion-dollar mainframe computers to the government, military and intelligence agencies, and other industries. During the 1960s and 1970s, Minnesota-based technology giants such as Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, UNIVAC, and IBM-Rochester anchored a robust high-tech economy in the Twin Cities. Honeywell alone accounted for 14,000 workers at its 21 plants, with an annual payroll of $70 million, historian Tom Misa has noted. Minneapolis-based General Mills, best known as a cereal company, also built “military electronics, torpedo directors, and bombsights during and after World War II,” and later made computers for NASA, the army, and the intelligence agencies. Hundreds of smaller businesses in the Twin Cities region also contributed parts, service, and expertise to the booming computer industry.
This enthusiasm for computing—and the recognition of its profound and growing importance to American life—permeated Minnesota’s schools. At University High School in Minneapolis, a group of teachers arranged for a teletype terminal to be installed during the 1965-66 school year. The teletype had a keyboard where users could communicate with a central computer, or with each other via the network. The terminal connected by long-distance telephone line to a computing network at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Suddenly, computing was a tactile, interactive experience for Minnesota students and teachers. They did not have to shuffle old-fashioned punch cards to create computer programs, handing the cards over to an operator who ran them through a remote, room-sized mainframe. Rather, students just sat down, typed in commands or requests, and got the solution to a problem or the latest news from another school seemingly instantaneously, displayed by the printer built into the teletype.