Minnesota has alot of computing history. I've always enjoyed history and technology, and so it's no surprise that I have an interest in the history of technology. Lately I've enjoyed digging back into that history and discovering a bit more about it as I dig into resources from the Charles Babbage Institute at University of Minnesota.
I started my Engineering Career with a brief stint at Computing Devices International. This was one of the Control Data companies, which has ties all the way back to the Univac from Remington Rand. This history is covered well by some interesting talks given here. This computer company formed just after World War II, and was for quite some time more dominant in the market than IBM. I hadn't thought much about my time at Computing Devices (now a part of General Dynamics) until my Retro Computing hobby brought me into contact with another piece of Minnesota computer history that I knew nothing about.
I was out purchasing another Macintosh Plus computer as a parts computer for my working Macintosh Plus and I asked the gentleman I was purchasing from if he had any other Retro Computer equipment he'd be willing to sell. In this case, he did have another computer, and he was wiling to sell it to me.
The latest member of the collection here is a CPT Corporation Model 9000...
The CPT 9000 is an IBM AT Compatible computer with a 286 processor and 1MB of RAM. There are several interesting things about this computer, but the one that I've enjoyed the most is that this computer was made in Minnesota.
When I say made in Minnesota, I'm not talking about assembled from board level in Minnesota, I mean that CPT Corporation designed the computer from the component level up in Minnesota. Here are some pictures I've taken of the boards. First the CPU Board (This is a single board computer design with a passive backplane)...
You can see CPT Corp. on the Silkscreen.
In reading about this company, they developed high end Word Processing systems, and there appears to be custom hardware on the mainboard to support their proprietary portrait mode, one page at a time display monitor. My examples does not include this monitor, or any proprietary display driver.
The RAM Board is here...
Also caries the CPT Corp. marks on the silkscreen, as does the Backplane...
The computer case is very heavy and well designed, I believe the Power Supply may be a custom design, as it is mounted as a loose board inside the chassis (no separate enclosure).
This particular computer appears to have been continuously updated till about the mid '90s. The rest of the components were not made in Minnesota, a plain 16 Bit ISA VGA Card with a Trident Chipset, a working 1.2MB Floppy Drive, a failed 1.44MB Floppy, a Super IO Card and HDD from the mid nineties. Perhaps this is the timeframe when CPT Corporation finally closed their doors?
Is this the last computer that CPT Corporation designed and manufactured before their demise? Is this the last (or only) IBM Compatible PC designed and manufactured in Minnesota?
None of the CPT Corporation software was on the computer, which is not surprising, but I must say I've been a bit disappointed. I've posted about this on the Vintage Computer Forum here, but there's been alot less interest in the hobbyist community in archiving business software, so no luck locating that yet.
Also, I have no idea what happened to the Intellectual Property and the remains of the company after the bankruptcy, perhaps the software has been lost to time, which would be a shame given the size of this company at its peak.
Please reach out via email (in my profile), or leave a comment below if you know any of the answers to my questions about CPT Corporation, this computer or the software it ran. Thanks!
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