Mainframes

If you’ve ever visited the Rowayton Library and Community Center you may know that UNIVAC, the first commercially-viable computer, was (partly) developed in that building (Historic Rowayton story, New York Times article). Originally a stable, the building was at that point a research lab of the Remington Rand corporation, headquartered across the street in the mansion that’s now the home of Graham Capital Management. UNIVAC famously predicted the outcome of the presidential election in 1952.

Remington Rand, and then later Sperry-Rand, was led by Darien resident James H Rand (1886-1968). In the 1940s he decided that he could reduce his commute time by buying the former mansion of James Augustine Farrell and turning it into a headquarters for his company. In the same period Rand purchased the property at 333 Wilson Avenue, turning it into the Laboratory for Advanced Research.

That's all very interesting but it's a little outside of our focus area in Roton Hill, so let's pull it back. While the development of Univac was going on in Rowayton, two members of the Rand family, both of them also employees of Remington Rand, were living on Westview Lane. The first of those relatives was Marcell Nelson Rand (1913-1979) son of the boss, who was a Vice President and General Manager of the International Division. Marcell, his wife Jane Ann Edwards (1916-2001) and their three sons lived in the house that is now #15 Westview (there were no house numbers back then) between 1946 and 1950.

Just down the road from Marcell lived his uncle Philip Scribner Rand (1906-1995), a much younger brother of the boss. Philip was an electrical engineer and Ham radio enthusiast involved primarily in analyzing radio and television signal interference. He and his second wife Louise Bertha Nelson (1917-2009) lived with their daughters in #4 Westview between 1947 and 1951. He must have enjoyed living near Scribner Avenue, presumably named after distant relatives on his mom’s side.

So neither of these Rand boys was particularly closely involved with the computer project, and to be fair they had both moved elsewhere by the time it was launched. But a strong connection, nonetheless.

Now you may not have heard that story, and in fact you may never have heard of Sperry-Rand at all. In the computer biz, Sperry-Rand was eventually eclipsed by a calculator manufacturer called IBM. As it turns out, one of the people most responsible for IBM’s eventual domination of the computer market was another Westview Laner named Cuthbert Corwin Hurd (1911-1996, Wikipedia bio). Hurd lived on the lane from 1951 to 1960, while he was the director of the IBM Applied Science Department near Columbia University in New York City. He convinced IBM to design and build their first computer, the IBM 701, and to invest heavily in the technology afterward. I think Hurd, his wife Bettie Jane Mills and their five children lived on the property that is now #14 Westview, but the house has since been replaced. Hurd eventually moved to Silicon Valley and founded arguably the first independent software development company.