Technology and computers have come a long way in the past century.


CHIPPEWA FALLS (WQOW) – Technology and computers have come a long way in the past century.

“They were giant super computers that would fill up the whole room, not like the mac and laptops we have today,” Jarrod Showalter, the Executive Director and Educator at the Chippewa Area History Center, said.

Now we are hitting the back button, learning about the work of an engineer from Chippewa Falls.

“Seymour Cray was born in 1925 here in Chippewa,” said Showalter.

His dad was the city engineer and let him experiment with the radio and other early electronics in the basement of his childhood home.

“So when he graduated in 1943 it was the middle of World War II and so he joined the army as a radio man and then eventually as a code breaker,” said Showalter

According to Showalter, coding machines are where early computing got its start.

After the war, the research continued when a business owner in the Twin Cities hired the coding teams.

“The army wanted to keep some of these teams together that has been doing a lot of this early computing technology. They didn’t know where the technology was going but they wanted to keep the teams together,” said Showalter.

That lead to the start of controlled data.

“Seymour Cray was a major researcher and that started coming up with what we know as computers today,” said Showalter.

Eventually, Seymour Cray came back to his roots.

“Because he wanted to come back to Chippewa, he spun off his own research branch and then his own company called Cray Research, where he came up with what we call the super computer,” said Showalter. 

After the fall of the logging industry in the post war era, this brought many needed job opportunities to the Chippewa Valley and inspired innovation nationwide.

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