Saint Paul, Minnesota
Saint Paul (often abbreviated St. Paul) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of Ramsey County, Minnesota, Ramsey County. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, ...
– January 11, 2005) was an American computer engineer.
Thornton studied
electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
at the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...
earning a bachelor's degree in 1950. Immediately afterwards he went to
Engineering Research Associates
Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. ERA became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were ...
(ERA), which was acquired by
Remington Rand
Remington Rand, Inc. was an early American business machine manufacturer, originally a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers. Formed in 1927 following a merger, Remington ...
in 1952. In 1958 he left with other ERA engineers to form the new
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the N ...
(CDC). He remained there until 1973 and was involved in the development of the
CDC 1604
The CDC 1604 is a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation (CDC). The 1604 is known as one of the first commercially successful transistorized computers. (The IBM 7090 was delivered ...
,
CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the I ...
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) – was an American
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
CDC 6000, which came onto the market in 1964.
In 1974 he co-founded Network Systems Corporation, which manufactured computer networks connecting mainframes and minicomputers, including HYPERchannel.
In 1994 he received the Eckert-Mauchly Award "for his pioneering work on high performance processors; for inventing the
scoreboard
A scoreboard is a large board for publicly displaying the score (sport), score in a game. Most levels of sport from high school and above use at least one scoreboard for keeping score, measuring time, and displaying statistics. Scoreboards i ...
for instruction issue; and for fundamental contributions to vector supercomputing." In 1997 he received the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award from the IEEE Computer Society "for pioneering contributions and leadership in high performance computing and networking."
Charles Babbage Institute
The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...