"Owned and funded by the State of Minnesota, MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, was created on July 1, 1973. The state of Minnesota had the foresight to create an organization that would help schools on a statewide basis to plan for the use of computers. At the time, Minnesota was a significant center for computing--Honeywell, Control, Univac and IBM had installations in the state. MECC was designed to develop educational computing programs for Minnesota school students, but also to join joint practices between K-12 an higher education. The MECC offices in Minnesota were recently closed in January 1999."