Engineering Research Associates

The ERA team started as a group of scientists and engineers working for the US Navy during WWII on code-breaking, a division known as the Communications Supplementary Activity - Washington (CSAW).

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.

They then met John Parker, an investment banker who had run Northwest Aeronautical Corporation (NAC), a glider subsidiary of Chase Aircraft, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

He 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.

"[2] Their first machine, Goldberg, completed in 1947, used a crude drum made by gluing magnetic tape to the surface of a large metal cylinder that could be spun at 50 RPM for reading (and much slower for writing).

James Pendergrass, a Navy officer attached to the codebreaking unit, had attended a series of lectures at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, and became convinced the only lasting solution to the code breaking problem was a computer that could be quickly re-programmed to work on different tasks.

This book was a revision of a report submitted to the Office of Naval Research, omitting references to cryptography; Mina Rees, then director of the ONR mathematical section, suggested that it should be published.

One of the book's most successful predictions concerned the transistor, which had recently been invented at Bell Laboratories: "It will probably be competitive with the electron tube in total cost per stage."

(page 423) ERA looked to selling similar machines to a number of customers, but at about this time they became embroiled in a lengthy series of political maneuvering in Washington.

Drew Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round claimed that the founding of ERA was a conflict of interest for Norris and Engstrom because they had used their war-time government connections to set up a company for their own profit.