He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner cities and disadvantaged communities.
[2] He spent two years on his family's farm after graduation, helping weather the Great Depression and a significant drought in the Midwest by risking the use of Russian thistle as cattle feed.
[1] Before entering military service, Norris sold X-Ray equipment for the Westinghouse Corporation in Chicago, then worked for the Bureau of Ordnance as a civil servant engineer until signing with the Naval Reserve.
He hired forty of the members of his codebreaking team and set up shop in a glider factory with Northwestern Aeronautical, a major government contractor.
ERA was fairly successful, but in the early 1950s a lengthy series of government probes into "Navy funding" drained the company and it was sold to Remington Rand.
Control Data started by selling magnetic drum memory systems to other computer manufacturers, but introduced their own mainframe, the CDC 1604, in 1958.
However, the machine didn't yet exist, and after carefully documenting sales lost to the IBM project, Norris launched a massive lawsuit against them in 1968.
During the early 1970s, Seymour Cray left to form his own company, which quickly drove CDC out of its leadership position in the supercomputer market.
He was survived by his wife Jane Malley Norris, eight children, sons William, George, Daniel, Brian, Roger and David, and daughters Constance Van Hoven and Mary Keck, 21 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.