Computer Control Company, Inc. (1953–1966), informally known as 3C, was a pioneering minicomputer company known for its DDP-series (Digital Data Processor) computers, notably:
It was founded in 1953 by Dr. Louis Fein, the physicist who had earlier designed the Raytheon RAYDAC computer.[1]
The company moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1959. Prior to the introduction of the DDP-series it developed a series of digital logical modules, initially based on vacuum tubes.
In 1966 it was sold to Honeywell, Inc. As the Computer Controls division of Honeywell, it introduced further DDP-series computers, and was a $100,000,000 business until 1970 when Honeywell purchased GE's computer division and discontinued development of the DDP line.[2]
In a 1970 essay, Murray Bookchin used the DDP-124 as his example of computer progress:
One of the oddest of the DDP series was the DDP 19—of which only three were built on custom order for the U.S. Weather service. Its architecture was based on a 19-bit word structure consisting of six octal bytes plus a sign bit, which in arithmetic operations could create the unusual value of "negative zero". One of these machines was donated by the government to the Milwaukee Area Technical College in 1972, which included a drum-based line printer and dual Ampex magnetic tape drives. It was used for a limited number of students as an "extra credit project device" for the next 2–3 years, after which it was scrapped to make space for newer equipment. The fate of the other two units is unknown.