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Home : Quarterly Archives : Volume 40 |
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Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society |
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Source: January 2003 Volume 40 Number 1, Pages 3–18 The Burroughs Research Center in Paoli
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In October 1951 the Burroughs Adding Machine Company of Detroit, Michigan, founded in 1886, announced a plan to build a $2 million electronic research laboratory in Paoli on a 12 acre plot bordered by old Route 202 (now Route 252) on the east, Central Avenue on the north, a Devereux Foundation property on the west, and the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks on the south. They first presented their plan at the October 1 evening meeting of the Paoli Business Men. [Note 1] The plan was for an L-shaped modern building of the architectural style then being used in new construction for colleges and universities. The site was to be a permanent home for the company's long-range research and development activities in high-speed business systems and equipment. Burroughs' work in this technology had begun at the University of Michigan and continued at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Irven Travis, Supervisor of Research at the Moore School from 1946 to 1948, and Director of Research at Burroughs from 1949 to 1952, would eventually be the Vice-President for Research at Burroughs in 1952 and then head of the new Paoli facility. Locally, the Burroughs Research Laboratory was then at 511 North Broad Street in Philadelphia and had a professional research staff of about 150. The company now desired a university campus setting, rather than their present location in an industrial area, for their ongoing development of business accounting systems and experimental work in electromechanics. Burroughs had been looking for a site for two years, it had to have a campus-like atmosphere and be close to transportation and to the Moore School. In those days before widespread air travel, the Paoli stop of the Pennsylvania Railroad was seen as convenient for travel to Burroughs' home office in Detroit. The John H. Dingee Estate owned the property at the time and it was zoned R-3 residential. Burroughs planned to file a petition before the Tredyffrin Township Board of Supervisors to rezone the plot to commercial. A one story 20 foot high building was to be 85,000 square feet and have two wings covering 20 per cent of the plot. The main wing, set 150 feet back from the street, was to extend 500 feet along Central Avenue. The main entrance to the building was to be in this wing on the inside of the L shape with Central Avenue to its back. The other wing, set 100 feet back, was to extend 300 feet along the Devereux Foundation side of the property. The wings were to be built into the natural slopes of the site with the deeper area near where the wings met allowing for a ground floor in the main wing out toward Route 202. There were to be no external structures such as power plants, antennas, etc. The part of the property near the railroad tracks was to be a 200 car parking lot with an entrance to it from Route 202 just to the north and west of the railroad underpass. The plans showed a long curving walk inside the L from the parking lot to the entrance. The entire area was to be screened from view with landscaping. There was to be one eight hour shift five days a week. Half of the 250-300 employees would be mathematicians, physicists, and electrical and mechanical engineers and the other half would be support staff. Burroughs' decision to proceed would depend on the attitude of the local residents. They wanted their new facility to add to the growth and dignity of the neighborhood and expected that many of the employees would move into the surrounding communities. The proposed plan prompted discussion in the community about whether Paoli was going to develop as a residential community or whether its future was more as a commercial or industrial area. Homeowners on the north side of Central Avenue and others concerned about the rezoning formed the Valley Hills Civic Association to oppose industrialization of the area. On November 13, 1951 a public hearing on the proposal took place in the auditorium of the Tredyffrin-Easttown High School in Berwyn with 300 local residents in attendance. [Note 2] On December 17 the three Tredyffrin Township supervisors, William T. Comer, a Paoli merchant, C. W. Leighton, a Berwyn plumbing contractor, and Joseph C. Hoffner, a Stratford hosiery manufacturer, unanimously approved the petition. Early in April 1952 Burroughs purchased the plot from Alexander L. H. Dingee and his wife, Eleanor Wedge Dingee of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It had originally belonged to John Henry Dingee, who, in the late 1800s, purchased about 100 acres here along the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was described as a handsome country place where his magnificent mansion, Fennerton, stood among lawns and shade trees. John Dingee died in 1913 and had been very active in the Paoli Town Association, the Tredyffrin School Board, the Great Valley Presbyterian Church, and the Paoli Presbyterian Church. [Note 3] Further information is needed about this Dingee family and property between 1913 and 1952. On April 10 the contract for the construction of the research laboratory was awarded to the Baton Construction Company of Philadelphia. Baton had built several other research laboratories, including ones for the Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Sharp and Dohme at West Point, Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania State College (now University). Walker-Yoemans Associates, also of Philadelphia, were the engineers and Aaron Colish and Frank E. Hahn of Philadelphia were the associate architects. Construction began in July and was expected to be completed early in 1954. A newspaper article dated April 17, 1953 states that the facility now costs $3 million and is to be air-conditioned, and that the name of the company is now the Burroughs Corporation. The cornerstone was laid on October 27, 1953. By this time the square footage of the facility had increased to 105,000 feet. Future staff was now estimated at close to 400. Moving in started on February 27, 1954. To minimize work disruptions, the move would be only on weekends over an eight to ten week period. The mover was Ryan & Christie of Bryn Mawr and it was estimated that it would take about 80 vanloads to move the computing, laboratory, and office equipment from the old laboratory at 511 North Broad Street in Philadelphia to Paoli. By the time the move began more than 75 families had relocated to Paoli and the nearby suburbs of Malvern, Berwyn, Strafford, and Wayne. Dr. Travis moved into his new Paoli office on April 5, 1954. The cafeteria, located in the central part of the building along with the administrative offices to the west, opened on June 8. The facility also had a scientific library and a 200 seat auditorium. Long Range View Of New Burroughs Corp. Plant At Paoli
LONG RANGE view of Burroughs Corp. electronics research and development building at Route 202 and Central Ave., just east of Paoli. View is north from Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line tracks. Administrative offices and cafeteria are at left of "B" and laboratory wing is at right. Parking lot in center foreground has room for 250 cars. The April 17, 1954 photograph above shows several changes from the original design. There are now two long parallel two-story laboratory wings along Central Avenue, a higher central section with a big "B," the Burroughs logo at the time, up on the side of the building and visible from Route 202, and a square of other offices, later called the administrative quadrangle, to the west. The main entrance was now on Central Avenue where there was a large lobby. The final cost was close to $5 million. The brick wall in the lower left corner of the above photograph is still standing. Burroughs still maintained four offices in Philadelphia: the Philadelphia District Sales office at 250 North Broad Street, a new Electronic Instruments Division at 1209 Vine Street, and both the Regional Accounting and Mid-Atlantic Sales Offices at 401 North Broad Street. The Paoli facility was called the Burroughs Research Center and had three main units: the Basic Research Division, the Development Division, and the Special Products Division. In September 1954 Burroughs had many open houses for engineering professionals and societies, corporate staff, and families of the employees. They reached out to the local community too. On September 21 they had a "Community Open House" that was attended by over 1,000 Paoli area residents. On December 14 forty-two seniors from Tredyffrin-Easttown High School in Berwyn visited to learn about Burroughs' long-range research programs in electromechanics and magnetics. On March 18, 1955 a Burroughs Research Center Fashion Show and Card Party to benefit Boy Scout troops in Paoli and Devon was supported by several local merchants: the Paoli Sport Shop, the Kae Mae Shop, and the shop of Miss Eleanor Callahan. In August 1958 William Hall, who had been a community relations representative for Burroughs and the editor of its internal house organ which had recently been discontinued, left to become general manager and editor of the Upper Main Line News. After three years at this paper, Hall left in March 1961 to join the staff of the Wilmington News Journal. [Note 4]
The first machine in Burroughs' new electronic line, the E101 Electronic Computer, was developed by the Paoli group and was announced in 1954. Marketing material for it bragged that it was "no larger" than the average office desk, was designed for mass production, and could be operated without special training. This computer was not a success, it wasn't very versatile and was never strongly promoted or developed by the company. After this Burroughs shifted most of its work to defense contracts, which it had been doing to some extent since World War II, and which were less risky and more cost effective to bring to the market. [Note 5] In doing this there was less basic research and more development work since the typical way to do business with the government was to propose and develop a company product in response to something the government said it needed. The Paoli facility, and later the other Burroughs facilities in this area, converted almost immediately to defense and other government work. By November 1955 it had hired a retired Rear Admiral of the U. S. Navy to be its Associate Director responsible for the Defense Administration work. During the 1950s and into the 1960s many eminent scientists and engineers left their current positions at universities, with the military, and related industries, to come to the Paoli campus, where they could work in an atmosphere conducive to their research and development goals. Many of them ended up obtaining patents, publishing papers, and winning prestigious professional awards. On May 11, 1956 Burroughs announced it had a contract with the U. S. Air Force to develop the computer that would be the "brains" in the ground guidance systems for missiles and that most of the work would be done at Paoli. Early in 1957 a research scientist at Paoli developed BEPOC, Burroughs Electrographic Printer-Plotter for Ordnance Computing, under a contract with Army Ordnance that exceeded requirements at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. Although primarily designed to process data from ballistic missiles and rockets, it was hoped BEPOC could also be used to process data from the first earth satellite to be launched during U. S. participation in the International Geophysical Year experiments. Contracts with the various branches of the armed forces continued and resulted in the following work at Paoli: • June 1957. U. S. Army. "Matabe," Multi-Weapon Automatic Target and Battery Evaluation, that calculated, among other things, how long it would take a missile to fire on an attacking airplane and the percentage of total bomb damage that would result. • July 1957. U. S. Army. Cordat II (Coordinate Data Set). Computer systems for receiving and transmitting communications between radar listening stations and control centers responsible for directing anti-aircraft fire on attacking airplanes. • January 1958. U. S. Air Force. Research and development of the electronic ground guidance system for the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at Cape Canaveral, Florida. This system was manufactured at Burroughs' Detroit plant. A scale model of this guidance system was on display at the Easttown Township Library on March 15, 1958, the date that library building on Midland Avenue in Berwyn was dedicated. One of the earliest successful launches of the Atlas was in December 1958 when it broadcast a recorded Christmas message from U. S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. This was America's first response to Russia's Sputnik, which had been launched on October 4, 1957. In 1965 the original Burroughs computer that guided the Atlas missile first tested in 1955 was presented to the Smithsonian Institution by the U. S. Air Force. • November 1958. U. S. Army Signal Research Development Laboratory. A 3,000-word-a-minute teletype machine that used a new printing technique called electrostatic recording. This technique is still used by most current photocopying machines. • November 1959. U. S. Air Force. Airborne Long Range Input (ALRI) to place computer-based radar stations in RC-121 Constellation reconnaissance aircraft as part of an early warning air defense system. With this project Burroughs acted as the overall project manager, integrating the work of several other multi-million dollar contracts the government had awarded to Electronic Communications, Inc. and Lockheed Aircraft Service. • July 1961. U. S. Air Force. System hardware contractor for the NORAD (North America Air Defense) combat operation center In Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colorado for a high-speed automated system to evaluate large amounts of simultaneous warning, surveillance, and weapons data. Burroughs created a new division "to be housed in the Burroughs Laboratories, Paoli" to manage the development of this system. Business systems and non-military projects were also developed and announced at Paoli: • April 1957. DATATRON, a computer that played blackjack. • September 9, 1959. The Visible Record Computer (VRC) developed for the banking industry that first used Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, first known as MICR and now evolved into OCR, or Optical Character Recognition. This Burroughs system consisted of the characters now found at the bottom of checks and later on other documents that could be read both by computer and the human eye. It was under development for 5 years and first put into operation at the First Pennsylvania Banking and Trust Company in Philadelphia in mid-September 1960. • February 20, 1962. John H. Glenn, Jr., aboard a Mercury spacecraft powered by an Atlas rocket, was the first American to orbit the earth. Burroughs ground guidance systems were responsible for approximately the first five minutes of the launch, from guiding the Atlas to the precise point in space where it would reach a successful orbit, to jettisoning the booster rockets, and finally to where the capsule separated and was on its way into space. Burroughs had been preparing for this moment by successfully guiding, without failure, over 100 space probes, orbital missions and ICBM shots from Cape Canaveral since 1955. As astounding as this achievement was, it is interesting to note that punched paper tape was the most advanced medium at this time for recording the data generated by this event. • October 1962. To demonstrate the Telstar communications satellite built by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), a Burroughs Laboratories D825 modular data processing system developed in Paoli successfully sent computer messages from Paoli to Detroit by way of the AT&T Long Lines Department in New York City and the Telstar antenna in Andover, Maine. Modular design was a new concept in computer design where separate subsystems controlled different parts of an integrated system. This meant that an entire new computer did not have to be built for each new application and that the Burroughs D825 could be used in many of their systems developed at this time. • August 1963. U. S. Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). To develop new electronic equipment to give air traffic controllers greater command over their information. In 18 millionths of a second the new system would take data from radar and beacon equipment, send it over ordinary land telephone lines, and display it on the scopes used by the air traffic controllers. A major component was to automatically filter out irrelevant information. This is another use of the D825 modular system. Twenty-two years later, in July 1985, System Development Corporation, a Burroughs subsidiary in Paoli was awarded a $37.5 million FAA contract to upgrade computerized radar equipment used by air traffic controllers at 120 small and medium-sized airports. The equipment was to be delivered between September 1986 and November 1987. • September 1964. U. S. Post Office Department. High-speed letter sorting machines. Over the next six years Burroughs had eight contracts worth over $40 million to develop and manufacture this equipment and by July 1970 there were over 300 of these sorters in 144 U. S. cities. • March 1971. General Services Administration for the U. S. Navy. $30.6 million contract for computer systems. This is one of the many contracts Burroughs had with various government agencies to manage their data processing activities. • March 1971. Delta, TWA and Pan Am Airlines. Installation of on ground runway taxiing and docking light systems at airport terminals in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, and Boston.
As early as May 1955, only one year after moving to the Paoli location, Dr. Travis announced that Burroughs had purchased a 104 acre tract in the Great Valley on the south side of Swedesford Road near Cedar Hollow Road and the boundary between Tredyffrin and East Whiteland Townships where a 28,500 square foot building was to be erected. It was to be designed by Walker-Yeomans Associates and construction would begin around June 15. It was to be occupied by mid September 1955 and was to house a Production section. It was about three miles north of the Paoli location. Staff at the Paoli facility had grown to more than 600. The Paoli facility had been designed to be flexible and expandable, but the option of a new facility was chosen instead. Burroughs also leased 10,000 square feet in the one-story Modern Dunnage Manufacturing Company building northeast of the intersection of old Route 202 and Howellville Road and about one mile north of the Paoli location. This was expected to be occupied almost immediately in May 1955. By April 1956 there were 1,400 employees. Parking had become a problem and spaces for cars at the Paoli facility were expanded to 720. The main lot by the railroad tracks was expanded to 375 spaces, 75 were added in an area of new construction near the cafeteria, and 270 spaces were added in a new addition near the administrative quadrangle. Part of this new area was reserved for visitor parking and had access from Central Avenue. Employees had to continue to use the entrance on Route 202. There were spaces for 200 cars at the Great Valley location. At the Modern Dunnage Manufacturing Company building the parking lot was expanded to accommodate 70 cars. In April 1957 the Tredyffrin Board of Supervisors announced that sidewalks would be installed on the Burroughs property fronting on Central Avenue. In November 1957 the building on Howellville Road, that had been called Building A, was purchased and was now called the Howellville Laboratory. Three buildings at the Swedesford Road location were now completed and were called the Great Valley Laboratories. In December 1957 Burroughs announced it would be leasing a building in Radnor on Radnor-Chester Road to be its headquarters and training center for the Military Field Services Division of Burroughs' Defense Contracts Organization, it was to have approximately 850 employees, and parking spaces for 350 cars. Military personnel and civilians were to be trained here to operate and maintain the defense systems Burroughs was producing. In January 1958 two 65-foot radar towers were erected at the Great Valley Laboratories location. Their purpose was to test the efficiency of systems for detecting enemy aircraft at long range that the Paoli Laboratories were developing for the U. S. Air Force. One tower, the "Temperate Tower," had an open steel framework and an up and down scanning motion that housed a height-finder radar. The other tower, the "Arctic Tower," had a closed style suitable for subzero temperatures and a circular scanning motion for sweeping an area to search for approaching aircraft. They were for simulation and testing only and not for actual defense. Nonetheless, local residents must have been alarmed. They may have known, or not known, that at the same time there was an active Nike missile launch site only about one and a half miles away on Diamond Rock Hill near Swedesford and LeBoutillier Roads. [Note 6] There was no connection between the two. Although it is not documented anywhere, the reader of the many local newspaper articles from this period begins to suspect that the phrase "Paoli Research Center" is, by the late 1950s, being used collectively to refer to all the local locations where research and development and production was going on. Also, the impression grows that the Paoli facility was increasingly devoted to management, administrative and support activities, that research and development were conducted at both the Paoli and Great Valley locations, and that production and manufacturing were at both the Great Valley and Howellville facilities. By January 1958, the total number of employees at the "Research Center" was 1,800, compared with 383 in April 1954; an increase of 470% in three and a half years. By 1960 the collective name of Burroughs Research Center was also used.
The original division was called the "Research Center" and was established in 1954. Eighteen months after the Research Center opened in April 1954, a Deputy Director was hired. A second division, called "Military Systems," was established in 1956. Both divisions were located in the Paoli facility. In August 1956 Dr. Travis' title was expanded to Vice-President of Research and Engineering. During the first three years, most of the new staff was scientists and technicians, but by early 1957 the number of non-scientific support staff started to increase. The third division, "Great Valley Laboratory," was established in 1958. Management and administrative staff expanded. First to be hired was a Director of Public Relations, in April 1958 a woman, Marilyn Joan Kennelly, was named as the Supervisor of Methods Publications in the Methods and Organization Planning Department. In April 1959 a new Systems Engineering Department was created and a Security Manager was hired. In February 1960 an Engineering Technical Editor came aboard. In May a College Relations Administrator was appointed. By November 1959 the Great Valley Laboratories had its own Program Manager for the ALRI and other radar defense projects. in August 1961 the Technical Manuals Department, started in 1955, was recognized for producing 242 manuals totaling more than 35,000 pages. On January 8, 1963 Burroughs integrated most of its local divisions into a new "Defense and Space Group" headquartered at Paoli. Locally, it included the laboratories at Paoli and Great Valley, the Military Field Service and Military Systems Divisions at Radnor, and the specialized electronic and electromechanical development and production work at Howellville. Detroit was also included in this group because its Military Computer Division manufactured in quantity all the systems developed here. 7 By the end of 1963, a part of this new group, the Control Instrument Division, was located at the Howellville facility. It had originally been the Control Instrument Company and became a Burroughs subsidiary when it was moved here from Brooklyn, N. Y. early in 1963. The U. S. Air Force Logistics Command awarded Burroughs a contract for the lease of six computer output microfilm units which were manufactured at the Howellville production facility. It is never really clear just where the organizational boundaries were between the work done at Paoli or Great Valley. After the Great Valley facility was built they both seem to be described together and are called, at various times, the Paoli Research Center, the Burroughs Research Center, or the Great Valley Laboratories. They were always, however, consistently said to be in Paoli, which may have been the mailing address since the administrative offices seem always to have been at the Paoli facility. It is probable that the Howellville facility was also part of this designation. In April 1965 Dr. Irven Travis was promoted to Vice-President, Technological Development. He retired in 1969. A February 9, 1969 article shows the letter sorting machinery Burroughs produced for the U. S. Post Office Department at its Downingtown plant. This consisted of two buildings on Boot Road just east of Route 322 about 13 miles west of Paoli. In 1980 it was still a major production facility for Burroughs systems. Burroughs Corporation Annual Reports occasionally featured "Tredyffrin" operations but never specifically said whether an activity was at Paoli or Great Valley, further confounding efforts to sort this out. The 1978 Report (page 10) shows a photograph of a very large-scale system produced at "Tredyffrin." The 1979 Report (page 19) shows a photograph of a technical support operation where system specialists in "Tredyffrin" could directly access the diagnostic unit of a Burroughs computer anywhere in the world as long as there were connecting telephone lines. The 1984 Report (page 11) shows a photograph of a thermal video system developed at "Tredyffrin" that gauged the heat output of mainframe computers to ensure long term reliability. The 1985 Report (page 5) shows the five scientists at "Tredyffrin" who developed a very powerful mainframe commercial computer Paoli is specifically mentioned in the 1981 Report (page 11), but only to show a small photograph of a computer-aided-design system used at this location. As Burroughs grew and evolved, activities at Paoli and the other local facilities seem to get swallowed up in the growth. In 1965 the former, predominately local, "Defense and Space Group" became the "Defense, Space, and Special Systems Group." In 1973 this group became the "Federal and Special Systems Group" downplaying defense work and stressing, instead, an increasing role in supplying the government with data processing systems for many different types of operations. [Note 8] By 1984 this group became the "Systems Development Corporation," a 6,000 employee worldwide Burroughs subsidiary, that worked exclusively with government. It supplied branches of armed services with non-defense minicomputers (state-of-the-art at that time) to manage logistics and other operations in the field and also had contracts with various state, local and international government units. [Note 9] By 1985 this subsidiary had government contracts totaling $650 million.
In the mid-1980s, W. Michael Blumenthal, former Secretary of the Treasury from 1977 to 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, and Chairman of the Board at Burroughs' home office in Detroit since 1981, had acquisitions fever. There were several reasons for this. The computer industry was in a decline and transition period, IBM had grown very large, and there was increasing competition from Japanese manufacturers. On May 8, 1986 Burroughs Corporation made a takeover bid for Sperry Corporation, located in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. [Note 10] Sperry had focused on submarine navigation systems and radar systems. Burroughs had focused on air defense and tactical systems for the U. S. Army. And both companies were major suppliers of information systems to the non-defense areas of the federal government. It probably seemed like an obvious merger. The merger would create the world's third largest computer company, with combined annual revenues of $9.7 billion, just under second place DEC (originally Digital Equipment Corporation) with annual revenues of $10.4 billion, but still only about one-fifth the size of IBM with annual revenues of $50.5 billion. The U. S. Department of Justice ruled that the potential acquisition raised no antitrust problems. [Note 11] On May 27, 1986 Sperry agreed to be acquired by Burroughs for $4.8 billion. The actual merger date was September 16, 1986. The new company name, Unisys, was chosen from 31,000 entries submitted from Burroughs employees. [Note 12] A sad, ironic note is that Dr. Irven Travis, the prime mover behind the establishment and growth of the Research Center in Paoli, died in Paoli Memorial Hospital on October 1, 1986, only two weeks after the merger. [Note 13] One difficulty of the merger was that the two companies manufactured mutually incompatible computer systems that would both now have to be supported. In addition, both systems were quickly becoming outdated. These were mainframe systems using proprietary in-house software at a time when such systems were being supplanted by a new industry standard of smaller networked computers using open systems that could interact with systems on other computers. [Note 14] Other incompatibilities also become apparent. At the time of the merger the total staff of the two companies was 122,000. Their workforces were very different. Most of Burroughs' employees were research engineers and manufacturing workers while most of Sperry's were administrators. In 1988 there were 3,300 Unisys employees working in Chester County. In 1991 over a dozen former Sperry administrators were found guilty in the III Wind Pentagon case that had dragged on since 1988 of bribing Pentagon officials to obtain military contracts. [Note 15] Unisys' fine of $190 million for their part in the III Wind case made already existing financial worries at the time of the merger even greater. In addition to the difficulties with their computers, these included an industrywide sluggish computer market, an overall economic downturn, a very high company debt, and lagging company profits. By 1987 Unisys was announcing plans for employee cuts and the sale of buildings. Nationally over 10,000 employees were cut [Note 16] and the Burroughs headquarters building in Detroit was sold to the Henry Ford Health System. [Note 17] In 1995 Unisys sold one of its most profitable businesses, the 17,000 employee defense contracting division, for $862 million. [Note 18] The company announced it now had four broad markets: financial, mostly banking, services, airline reservations, telecommunications, and the public sector as the largest computer supplier to the federal government. [Note 19] Locally, the Great Valley facility was sold first. At the time, it was described as a 76-acre complex that included a 288,000-square-foot factory, office, and training space and dormitories for trainees. It was sold in the middle of 1990 for $25 million. Unisys expected to lease the building back after the sale. It would discontinue the manufacturing operations at this location, which employed about 475 people, but the approximately 1,500 white collar employees, including a 500 person engineering unit, working there would continue to do so in the lease-back arrangement. In 2002 this building in Tredyffrin Township at 2476 Swedesford Road at the intersection with Cedar Hollow Road at the edge of the Great Valley Corporate Center is called the Unisys East Coast Development Center. Eighty additional positions in two other Chester County plants, presumably Howellville and Downingtown, were also to be eliminated. The Southpoint office park now stands where the Howellville facility used to be. By February 1990 the Paoli facility was for sale and the 200-250 engineers and white-collar workers still working there in defense industry contracts were to be moved to the Great Valley location by March 31. [Note 20] On December 8, 1992 Unisys sold the property to South Mountain Forestry Corporation of Bryn Mawr for $1.3 million. [Note 21] In April 1994 the developer planned to break ground for a six building, 141 condominium unit facility for adults 55 and older that would open by October or November of that year and would be called Paoli Pointe. An additional building with 100 units, now called Highgate at Paoli Pointe, an assisted living community, was scheduled to be open by May 1995. [Note 22] As a prelude to America's corporate scandals of 2002, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a scathing editorial on September 21, 1991 denouncing Mr. Blumenthal as the "villain . . . who masterminded an unwise merger and made a fortune in the process." [Note 23]
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