Floyd Steele

Floyd Steele was an American physicist, engineer and computer designer who grew up in Brush, Colorado, and is remembered for leading the Northrop Corporation design group that built the MADDIDA, an early digital computer. He studied physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, then electrical engineering and aeronautical engineering at Caltech, and worked for Douglas Aircraft from 1941 to 1944 before joining Northrop. The MADDIDA, begun in 1946, used a magnetic drum memory and was described as the first computer to represent bits with voltage levels and to have its whole logic specified in Boolean algebra. In 1950 Steele and members of his team left Northrop to found the Computer Research Corporation, which developed the Cadac minicomputer and was sold to National Cash Register in 1953.