Valparaiso Magazine - Winter 2021

A LOOK BACK
>> A LOOK
Valparaiso Enters the
Information
By Kevin Pazour
W
hen Urschel Laboratories purchased its first computer, the
industrial firm had been producing food-processing machinery
for over fifty years. Around 1963, Urschel Labs installed a
computer onsite to control aspects of its manufacturing operation,
to write payroll, and to handle its accounts payable and receivable.
Employee Roy Kruse realized the potential of this machine. He approached Joe
Urschel with the idea of starting a data processing company as a wholly owned
subsidiary of Urschel Labs. After all, the industrial giant had extra cash on hand that
it needed to allocate.
Indiana Information Controls opened its doors in 1967 with Roy Kruse as Executive
Vice President. Kruse knew that banks would be IIC’s primary, and most lucrative,
customer base — though the firm would also provide data processing services for
a multitude of other commercial and governmental enterprises. A June 1967 IIC
advertisement in the Vidette-Messenger warned companies that “You can rent or
buy a computer for peanuts. It’s just the programming time, specialists, operating
expenses, special room, modifications, unused time and over head that cost you
your shirt.” IIC offered its customers the ability to pay only for the services they
required. With such expensive machinery and complex technology, IIC’s offer
appealed to many companies.
Photo of
IIC Machinery from
The Vidette Messenger,
January 29, 1977
IIC could process checks faster and
at a lower cost than companies who
traditionally oversaw their own
billing and payroll programs. In
late 1968, IIC took over the billing
and payroll for the Valparaiso
Water Department. The Water
Department could produce one
bill for twenty cents — IIC could
do it for thirteen cents. It took
workers at the Water Department
about ten days a month to
process billings, while IIC could
complete the work in a matter
of hours. Further, IIC’s computer
system could provide the
Water Department with an
unprecedented wealth of data
on municipal water usage,
expanding the searchable
IIC logo as printed in The Videtter-Messenger, June 12, 1967
categories from two to twenty-five. According
to Water Department Chief Engineer Philip
Coote, the IIC system “shows everything that’s
now on the ledger card, but better.”
A few years later, IIC took over the payroll
program for the Porter Memorial Hospital
and the billing program for a few other local
water departments. However, the firm’s
real profitability came from its number one
customer: banks. By 1969, only two years
after opening its doors, IIC performed data
processing for fourteen banks in Northern
Indiana and Southern Michigan. IIC now
employed thirty people and had added a
second Honeywell 1200 computer system to
its state of the art Valparaiso computer center
at 2401 Calumet. By 1971, IIC expanded its
computer center by 4,000 square feet, bringing
it to a total of 12,000 square feet, in order to
accommodate the swelling demand caused by
its ever-increasing number of banking clients.
By 1975, IIC was processing data for fortyseven
banks in Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.
The firm had begun to offer “on-line” services
to its bank customers, and was in the early
stages of introducing a system that would allow
customers of client banks to withdraw money
from their checking accounts twenty-four
hours a day — a device that would eventually
be known as the automated teller machine,
or ATM. Though engineers at IIC did not
invent the ATM, the company was the first to
34 VALPARAISO MAGAZINE | WINTER 2021