CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first manufactured in 1965. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming the fastest machines of the era by about three times. It remained the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.

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CDC's first products were based on the machines designed at ERA, which Seymour Cray had been asked to update after moving to CDC. After an experimental machine known as the Little Character, they delivered the CDC 1604, one of the first commercial transistor-based computers, and one of the fastest machines on the market. Management was delighted, and made plans for a new series of machines that were more tailored to business use; they would include instructions for character handling and record keeping for instance. Cray was not interested in such a project, and set himself the goal of producing a new machine that would be 50 times faster than the 1604. When asked to complete a detailed report on future plans at one and five years into the future, he wrote back that his five year goal was "to produce the largest computer in the world", and his one year plan "to be one-fifth of the way".

Mainframe: Mainframe may refer to one of the following:...

Computer: A computer is a device or for processing information from data according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. The information to be processed may represent numbers, text, pictures, or sound, amongst many other types....

Control Data Corporation: Control Data Corporation, or CDC, was one of the pioneering supercomputer firms. For most of the 1960s they built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s to what was effectively a spinoff. CDC was one of the eight major computer companies through most of the 19...