Post-war Organization
Wenger and two members of the CSAW team, William Norris and Howard Engstrom, started looking for investors interested in supporting the development of a new computer company. Their only real lead, at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., eventually fell through.
They then met John Parker, an investment banker who had run a Chase Aircraft glider subsidiary, Northwest Aeronautical Corporation (NAC), in St. Paul, Minnesota. NAC was in the process of shutting down as the war ended most contracts, and he was looking for new projects to keep the factory running. Parker was told nothing about the work the team would do, but after being visited by a series of increasingly high ranking naval officers culminating with James Forrestal, he knew "something" was up and decided to give it a try. Norris headed up the new team, now known as ERA, moving to the NAC factory in 1946.
During the "early" years the company took on any engineering work that came their way, but were generally kept in business developing new code-breaking machines for the Navy. Most of the machines were custom-built to crack a specific code, and increasingly used drum memory in order to store the intercepted messages to be studied. To ensure secrecy, the factory was declared to be a Navy Reserve base, and armed guards were posted at the entrance.
Read more about this topic: Engineering Research Associates
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