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CDC 6600 Dead

CDC 6600
KindMachine
Introduced1964
Discontinued1970
StatusDead
ManufacturerSeymour Cray / CDC
ClassSupercomputer
Platform60-bit, ~3 MHz
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

The machine the word 'supercomputer' was coined for — Cray's ten-times-faster design, built by 34 people in rural Wisconsin, beating IBM's flagship by a mile.

Created by Seymour Cray Control Data Corporation

Cray retreated to a lab in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and built the 6600 with 34 people — 60-bit, ~10 MHz equivalent, ten times faster than the IBM 7090 it obsoleted. Freon-cooled, RISC-like instruction set, peripheral processors freeing the CPU.

IBM's Thomas Watson Jr. wrote a famous internal memo asking how 34 people could beat the world's largest company. The answer was Cray.

→ Read the full article on the ALB Wiki

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600