One recent morning, 99-year-old Don Weidenbach tinkered with a balky humidifier on a workbench in the basement of his senior condo building in Edina. He's volunteered to repair busted lamps and small appliances since he and his wife of 68 years, Charleen, moved there in 2010.
"My dad was no good at fixing things, so I started early — tightening loose doorknobs and fixing toilets as a kid," he said during a break for lunch.
Weidenbach blossomed as a digital computer pioneer after World War II and forged a 30-year career as an electrical engineer in the early years of Minnesota's computer tech era. Through a dizzying swirl of mergers and spinoffs, companies such as Remington Rand, Sperry, Univac and Control Data emerged.
Throw in Honeywell and IBM's massive Rochester facility and, by 1960, Minnesota was an early Silicon Valley — and Weidenbach was right in the thick of it.
"Back then, the word 'computer' wasn't even part of the vocabulary," Weidenbach said. "We were concerned there wouldn't be a market and they wouldn't last because they were too large, used thousands of vacuum tubes and cost more than a million dollars a unit."
All that changed 75 years ago this month, when an electronics company called Engineering Research Associates (ERA) opened its doors in St. Paul's Midway district near the old Montgomery Ward store. Computer pioneers like Weidenbach moved into a large industrial plant at 1902 W. Minnehaha Av., where wartime gliders had been built. Backed with military contracts, ERA started as a secretive company to continue the U.S. Navy's code-breaking advances that ramped up after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caught the nation off guard in 1941.
While with ERA, Weidenbach developed magnetic drums the size of car tires that stored information — the grandparents of today's hard drives. A commercial computer he designed enabled a catalog company to punch in phone orders and track inventory; 70 years later, we do the same with phones in our pockets.
Weidenbach grew up in Scotland, S.D., and earned an electrical engineering degree at South Dakota State College in 1943. After joining the Army, he was trained as a radio communications expert and served in the Philippines during World War II.