DDRIG: Control Data: American Power and the Global Assembly Line 1957-1992

This research investigates global supply chains as a historical socio-political model for the manufacture of high-technology products—such as disk packs, integrated circuits, printers, and terminals—that emerged in response to US industrial policy during the second half of the twentieth century. The project aims to enhance public awareness by providing critical historical context for recent concerns over globalization, technology trade, and the Buy American movement. It, furthermore, speaks to the geopolitical and socio-economic stakes of such trade, helping us understand when globalized supply distribution works—and doesn’t—and for whom. Drawing on extensive research in business and state government archives as well as oral histories with former tech workers, the project explores the creation of a global supply chain at one major US-based firm—Control Data Corporation. Control Data, US Defense contractor and rival of IBM, produced some of the fastest and most powerful supercomputers of the twentieth century. Facing a decline in US Defense Department funding for research and development (R&D), however, the company began globalizing its manufacturing operations in the early 1960s. This global assembly line broke manufacturing into phases—R&D, marketing, assembly, and the production of parts and components—and strategically placed these phases around the world, from eastern Kentucky to Romania to South Korea. Reorganizing production lowered the costs of basic manufacturing, allowing executives to redistribute savings across the firm and take advantage of the dollar’s strength in international trade. At the same time, this production model assisted US power abroad by reordering public-private partnerships forged at the height of the Cold War across various federal agencies (Defense, State, Labor, etc.). The research zeros in on not only the interplay between company representatives and government officials in making the supply chain model in high-tech, but also foregrounds businessmen and bureaucrats’ enlisting thousands of women into the company’s global electronic assembly operations. Overall, the project demonstrates that, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed and Control Data wound down in the early 1990s, one-world trade had been well underway for three decades in the computer industry—an arrangement with its own social and strategic trade-offs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.