Computer Control Corporation
Computer Control Corporation (often referred to as CCC or 3C for short) was a company which made minicomputers, the 'DDP' families. (DDP means 'digital data processor'.) They included the first 16-bit minicomputer, of the Series 16 family.
CCC was formed in Massachusetts in 1952 by a group of ex-Raytheon engineers. They were involved in several US government projects in the military and space fields, as well as working in the commercial process control area. In 1959, Ben Kessel became president of CCC, and moved it to Framingham. He was an engineer who had been educated at MIT, and then worked for Raytheon, and at what later became NASA.
Honeywell bought the company in 1966, and it was renamed to Honeywell's 'Computer Control Division'; they remained a separate division until 1970. At that point, Honeywell bought General Electric's computer business, and decided to concentrate on large time-sharing computers.
Further reading
- Gardner Hendrie A Personal Odyssey: From the First 16·bit Mini to Fault Tolerant Computers, in Computer Museum Report, Vol. 15, Spring 1986
- Robert C. Baron, What Was It Like Orville? Some Observations on the Early Space Program, Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, 2002 - focuses on CCC's work with NASA, but also covers the company and their computers
- Robert L. Massard, Digital Pioneering: Raytheon's RAYDAC Computer 1948-1957 and Computer Control Company 1953-1966, self-published, Wellesley Hills, 2007 - basically a scrap-book of relevant documents from other sources
External links
- ComputerControlCompany - documentation at Bitsavers (extensive)
- The 3C Legacy Project
- 3C Products and Services - many brochures
- Apollo Mission Simulators & Computer Control Company’s DDP-224 - also briefly covers the DDP-116
- Oral histories of several founders of CCC
