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The Control Data Corporation 6600 was the world's first supercomputer,
designed by Seymour Cray and James E. Thornton.
The 6600 had 60 bit words with 18 bit addresses, for a potential
of 256k words (or about 2 megabytes) of memory, but was commonly only shipped with 128k words, while the 6400 was commonly
equipped with 64k words. It processed 10 million instructions per second, awesome speed for 1964.
Characters were 6 bits wide (64 possible characters) and 10 of them were packed into the larger
60-bit word.
The programming language Pascal was created on the CDC 6000 series
computers at ETH Zurich (Federal Instute of Technology).
The machine was Freon cooled. Selling for $6 to $10 million each,
Control Data Corporation manufactured about 100 machines.
The console screens were calligraphic, not raster based. Analog circuitry actually steered
the electron beams to draw the individual characters on the screen.
Your kids would complain to you that it was too slow to play their favorite video games.
Wikipedia has a good section on the CDC 6600
How did Control Data Corporation get started?
(from Wikipedia)
During World War II the U.S. Navy had built up a team of engineers
to build codebreaking machinery for both Japanese and German mechanical ciphers. A number of these were produced by a team
dedicated to the task working in the Washington, D.C. area. With the post-war wind-down of military spending the Navy grew
increasingly worried that the team would break up and scatter into various companies, and started looking for ways to covertly
keep the team together.
Eventually they found their solution; the owner of a Chase Aircraft
affiliate in St. Paul, Minnesota, John Parker, was about to lose all his contracts with the end of the war. The Navy never
told Parker exactly what the team did, as it would have taken too long to get top secret clearance. Parker was obviously wary,
but after several meetings with increasingly high-ranking Naval officers it became apparent that whatever it was they were
serious, and he eventually agreed to house the team in his glider factory.
The result was Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a contract
engineering company that worked on a number of seemingly unrelated projects in the early 1950s. One of these was one of the
first commercial stored program computers, the 36-bit ERA 1103. The machine was built for the Navy, who intended to use it
in their "above board" code-breaking centers. In the early 1950s a minor political debate broke out in Congress about the
Navy essentially "owning" ERA, and the ensuing debates and legal wrangling left the company drained of both capital and spirit.
In 1952 Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand.
Although Rand kept the ERA team together and developing new products,
they were most interested in ERA's drum memory systems. Rand soon merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand, and
in the process of merging the companies, the ERA division was folded into Sperry's UNIVAC division. At first this did not
cause too many changes at ERA, as the company was used primarily as engineering talent to help support a variety of projects.
However one major project was actually moved from UNIVAC to ERA, the UNIVAC II project, which led to lengthy delays and upset
everyone involved.
As the Sperry "big company" mentality encroached on the decision-making
power of the ERA founders, they eventually got fed up and decamped to form Control Data in 1957, setting up shop in an old
warehouse down the road in Minneapolis at 501 Park Avenue. Of the members forming CDC, William Norris was the unanimous choice
to become chief executive officer of the new company. Seymour Cray was likewise chosen to be the chief designer, but was still
in the process of completing an early version of the 1103-based Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) and did not leave to join
CDC until this was complete.
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| Cray 3 Supercomputer |
1993 Cray 3 Computer
Seymour Cray chose exotic gallium arsenide (GaAs), instead of silicon,
for the circuitry of the Cray-3. The modules in this “brick” comprise a multi-layer sandwich of printed circuit
boards that contain 69 electrical layers and four layers of GaAs circuitry. It consumed 90,000 watts of power and, like the
Cray-2, was cooled by immersion in Fluorinert. Only one complete Cray-3 was built. A computation that took the Cray-3 only
one second would have taken ENIAC 67 years.
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