Control Data Corporation
Encyclopedia
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a supercomputer
firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray
left the company to found Cray Research, Inc. (CRI). CDC was one of the nine major United States computer
companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM
, Burroughs Corporation, DEC
, NCR
, General Electric
, Honeywell
, RCA
, and UNIVAC
. CDC was well known and highly regarded throughout the industry at one time.
the U.S. Navy
had built up a team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery for both Japanese and German
electro-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 this team would break up and scatter into various companies, and it 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, since 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 give this team a home in his military 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, which 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, it was most interested in ERA's magnetic 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, since the company was used primarily to provide engineering talent to support a variety of projects. However, one major project was moved from UNIVAC to ERA, the UNIVAC II
project, which led to lengthy delays and upsets to nearly everyone involved.
Since the Sperry "big company" mentality encroached on the decision-making powers of the ERA founders, they left Sperry to form the Control Data Corp. in 1957, setting up shop in an old warehouse down the road from Sperry in Minneapolis at 501 Park Avenue. Of the members forming CDC, William Norris
was the unanimous choice to become the chief executive officer
of the new company. Seymour Cray
was likewise chosen to be the chief designer, but he was still in the process of completing an early version of the 1103-based Naval Tactical Data System
(NTDS), and he did not leave Sperry to join CDC until it was complete.
-based 6-bit machine known as the "CDC Little Character" to test his ideas on large-system design and transistor-based machines. "Little Character" was a success, and CDC soon released a 48-bit transistorized version of their 1103 re-design as the CDC 1604
in 1959, with the first machine delivered to the U.S. Navy in 1960. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address (501 Park Avenue) to Cray's former project, the ERA-Univac 1103. A 12-bit cut-down version was also released as the CDC 160A
in 1960, arguably the first minicomputer
. The 160A was particularly notable as it was built as a standard office desk item, which was a rather-unusual packaging for that era. New versions of the basic 1604 architecture were rebuilt into the CDC 3000
series, which sold through the early and mid-1960s.
Cray immediately turned to the design of a machine that would be the fastest (or in the terminology of the day, largest) machine in the world, setting the goal at 50 times the speed of the 1604. This required radical changes in design, and as the project "dragged on" — it had gone on for about four years by then — the management got increasingly upset and it demanded greater oversight. Cray in turn demanded (in 1962) to have his own remote lab, saying that otherwise, he would quit. Norris agreed, and Cray and his team moved to Cray's home town, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
. Not even Bill Norris, the founder and president of CDC, could visit Cray's laboratory without an invitation. (See story of a salesman's uninvited visit to Chippewa Falls here.)
One of its first peripherals was a tape transport, which led to some internal wrangling as the Peripherals Equipment Division attempted to find a reasonable way to charge other divisions of the company for supplying the devices. If the division simply "gave" them away at cost as part of a system purchase, they would never have a real budget of their own. Instead, a plan was established in which it would share profits with the divisions selling its peripherals, a plan eventually used throughout the company.
The tape transport was followed by the 405 Card Reader
and the 415 Card Punch, followed by a series of tape drive
s and drum printers, all of which were designed in-house. The printer business was initially supported by Holley Carburetor in the Rochester, Michigan
suburb outside of Detroit. They later formalized this by creating a jointly-held company, Holley Computer Products. Holley later sold its stake back to CDC, the remainder becoming the Rochester Division.
Norris was particularly interested in breaking out of the punched card
–based workflow, where IBM held a stranglehold. He eventually decided to buy Rabinow Engineering, one of the pioneers of optical character recognition
(OCR) systems. The idea was to bypass the entire punched card stage by having the operators simply type onto normal paper pages with a "known" typewriter font, and then submit those pages to the computer. Since a typewritten page contains much more information than a punched card (which has essentially one line of text from a page), this would offer savings all around. Unfortunately, this seemingly-simple task turned out to be much harder than anyone expected, and while CDC became a major player in the early days of OCR systems, it has remained a niche product to this day. Rabinow's plant in Rockville, MD was closed in 1976, and CDC left the business.
With the continued delays on the OCR project, it became clear that punched cards were not going to go away any time soon, and CDC had to address this as quickly as possible. Although the 405 remained in production, it was an expensive machine to build. So another purchase was made, Bridge Engineering, which offered a line of lower-cost as well as higher-speed card punches. All card-handling products were moved to what became the Valley Forge Division after Bridge moved to a new factory, with the tape transports to follow. Later on, the Valley Forge and Rochester divisions were spun off to form a new joint company with National Cash Register (later NCR Corporation
), Computer Peripherals Inc
(CPI), in order to share development and production costs across the two companies. ICL later joined the effort. Eventually the Rochester Division was sold to Centronics
in 1982.
Another side-effect of Norris's attempts to diversify was the creation of a number of service bureau
s that ran jobs on behalf of smaller companies that could not afford to buy computers. This was never very profitable, and in 1965, several managers suggested that the unprofitable centers be closed in a cost-cutting measure. Nevertheless, Norris was so convinced of the idea that he refused to accept this, and ordered an across-the-board "belt tightening" instead.
Meanwhile at the new Chippewa Falls lab, Seymour Cray, Jim Thornton, and Dean Roush put together a team of 34 engineers, which continued work on the new computer design. In 1964, this was released onto the market as the CDC 6600
, out-performing everything on the market by roughly ten times. The 6600 had a CPU
(Central Processing Unit) with multiple, asynchronous functional units, and it used 10 logical, external I/O processors to off-load many common tasks. That way the CPU could devote all of its time and circuitry to processing actual data, while the other controllers dealt with the mundane tasks like punching cards and running disk drives. Using late-model compiler
s, the machine attained a standard mathematical operations rate of 500 kilo-FLOPS
, but handcrafted computer assemblies delivered about 1.0 mega-FLOPS. A simpler, much slower, and much less expensive version, implemented using a more traditional serial processor design rather than the 6600's parallel functional units, was released as the CDC 6400
, and a two-processor version of the 6400 was called the CDC 6500. Cray turned to an even faster machine built along different lines, then known as the 6800.
A Fortran compiler known as MNF (Minnesota Fortran) was developed by Lawrence A. Liddiard and E. James Mundstock at the University of Minnesota
for the 6600.
It was after the delivery of the 6600 that IBM took notice of this new company. At the time, Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
asked (words to the effect of) How is it that this tiny company of 34 people — including the janitor — can be beating us when we have thousands of people?, to which Cray reportedly quipped You just answered your own question. In 1965, IBM started an effort to build its own machine that would be even faster than the 6600, the ACS-1
. Two hundred people were gathered together on the U.S. West Coast
to work on the project, away from corporate prodding, in an attempt to mirror Cray's off-site lab. The project produced interesting computer architecture and technology, but it was not compatible with IBM's very successful System/360
line of computers. The computer-makers were directed to make it IBM-360-compatible, but that compromised its performance. The ACS was canceled in 1969, no product was ever produced. Many of the engineers left the company, leading to a brain-drain in IBM's high-performance departments.
In the meantime, IBM announced a new version of the famed System/360, the Model 92, which would be just as fast as CDC's 6600. This machine did not exist, but its nonexistence did not stop sales of the 6600 from drying up, while people waited for the release of the mythical Model 92. Norris did not take this tactic, dubbed as fear, uncertainty and doubt
(FUD), lying down, and in an extensive antitrust
lawsuit launched against IBM a year later, he eventually won a settlement valued at $80 million. He picked up IBM's subsidiary Service Bureau Corporation (SBC), which ran computer processing for other corporations on its own computers. SBC fit nicely into CDC's existing service bureau offerings.
During the designing of the 6600, CDC had set up Project SPIN to supply the system with a high speed hard disk
memory system. At the time, it was unclear if disks would replace magnetic memory drums, nor was it clear at the time whether fixed or removable disks would become the more prevalent. Thus, SPIN explored all of these approaches, and eventually it delivered a very large 28" diameter fixed disk and also a smaller multi-platter 14" removable disk-pack system. Over time, the hard disk business pioneered in SPIN would turn into a major product line.
(previously referred to as the 6800 within CDC). This machine's hardware clock speed was almost four times that of the 6600 (36 MHz vs. 10 MHz), and it offered considerably more than four times the total throughput. Much of this speed increase was due to extensive use of pipelining
, a technique that allows different parts of the CPU to work simultaneously on different parts of successive instructions of the process at the same time (in the same way that an automotive assembly line can produce one vehicle every 90 seconds, and thus easily 300 vehicles per 8 hour shift by doing a partial assembly of each vehicle simultaneously every 90 seconds, while any one vehicle will take several hours to be completely assembled). With this technique, the time to run any particular instruction is no faster, but the program as a whole moves through the computer more quickly since the instructions are queued in an efficient manner.
The 7600 did not do well in the marketplace because it was introduced in the 1969 downturn in the U.S. national economy. Its complexity had led to poor reliability. The machine was slightly incompatible with the 6000-series, so it required a completely different operating system, which like most new OSs, was primitive. The 7600 project paid for itself, yet it damaged CDC's reputation.
Cray then turned to the design of the CDC 8600
. This design included four processors in a single, smaller case. The smaller size and shorter signal paths allowed the 8600 to run at much higher clock speeds, and in combination with higher speed memory, these features provided most of the performance gains. The 8600, however, belonged to the "old school" in terms of its physical construction, and it used individual components soldered to circuit boards. The design was so compact that cooling and servicing the CPU modules proved effectively impossible. Because of too many hot-running solder joints in it that the machines did not work reliably, Cray recognized that a re-design was needed.
underway, led by Cray's former collaborator on the 6600/7600, Jim Thornton. Unlike the 8600's "four computers in one box" solution to the speed problem, the STAR was a new design using a unit that we know today as the vector processor
. By highly pipelining math instructions with purpose-built instructions and hardware, math processing is dramatically improved in a machine that was otherwise slower than a 7600. Although the particular set of problems it would be best at solving was limited - in comparison to the general-purpose 7600, it was for solving exactly these problems that customers would buy CDC machines.
Since these two projects competed for limited funds during the late 1960s, Norris felt that the company could not support simultaneous development of the STAR and a complete redesign of the 8600. Therefore, Cray left CDC to form the Cray Research company in 1972. Norris remained, however, a staunch supporter of Cray, and he even invested money into Cray's new company. In 1974, CDC released the STAR, designated as the Cyber 203. It turned out to have "real world" performance that was considerably worse than expected. STAR's chief designer, Jim Thornton, then left CDC to form the Network Systems Corporation
.
A variety of systems based on the basic 6600/7600 architecture were repackaged in different price/performance categories of the CDC Cyber
, which became CDC's main product line in the 1970s. An updated version of the STAR architecture, the Cyber 205, had considerably better performance than the original. By this time, however, Cray's own designs, like the Cray-1
, were using the same basic design techniques as the STAR, but were computing much faster.
Sales of the STAR were weak, but Control Data Corp. produced a successor system, the Cyber 200/205, that gave Cray Research some competition. CDC also embarked on a number of special projects for its clients, who produced an even smaller number of black project
computers. The CDC Advanced Flexible Processor (AFP), also known as CYBER PLUS, was one such machine.
Another design direction was the "Cyber 80" project, which was aimed at release in 1980. This machine could run old 6600-style programs, and also had a completely new 64-bit architecture. The concept behind Cyber 80 was that current 6000-series users would migrate to these machines with relative ease. The design and debugging of these machines went on past 1980, and the machines were eventually released under other names.
CDC was also attempting to diversify its revenue from hardware into services and this included its promotion of the PLATO (computer system) computer-aided learning system, which ran on Cyber hardware and incorporated many early computer interface innovations including bit-mapped touchscreen terminals.
, whose design goal being a machine processing data at 10 GFLOPs, about 40 times the speed of the Cray-1. The design never fully matured, and it was unable to reach its goals. Nevertheless, the product was one of the fastest computers on the market, and a handful of those computers were sold during the next few years. The effort ended after half-hearted attempts to sell ETA Systems. In 1989, most of the employees of ETA Systems were laid off, and the remaining ones were folded into CDC.
Meanwhile, several very large Japanese manufacturing firms were entering the market. The supercomputer
market was too small to be able to afford more than a handful of companies, so CDC started looking for other markets. One of these was the high-performance hard disk drive market, which was becoming more lucrative as personal computer
s (PCs) began to include them in the mid-1980s. Through its Magnetic Peripherals unit, originally a joint venture with Honeywell
and Honeywell Bull, CDC became a major player in the hard disk drive market. It was the world wide leader in 14 inch disk drive technology in the OEM
marketplace in the 1970s and early 1980s especially with its SMD (Storage Module Drive) and CMD (Cartridge Module Drive). CDC was an early developer of the eight-inch drive technology that was pioneered by Shugart Associates
with products from its MPI Oklahoma City Operation. Its CDC Wren series drives were particularly popular with "high end" users, although it was behind the capacity growth and performance curves of numerous startups such a Micropolis, Atasi, Maxtor, and Quantum. CDC also co-developed the now universal Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) interface with Compaq
and Western Digital
, which was aimed at lowering the cost of adding low-performance drives.
Inexplicably, CDC exited the hard disk drive business entirely in 1988, spinning off Magnetic Peripherals under the name Imprimis. The next year, Seagate Technology
, which had been seriously lagging in the high-end drive market, purchased Imprimis. The remainder of CDC was renamed Control Data Systems, Inc. and was bought out by Syntegra (USA), a subsidiary of the BT Group
, and merged into BT's Global Services organization.
CDC's Energy Management Division was one of the most successful CDC business units, providing control systems solutions that managed as much as 25% of all electricity on the planet. In 1988 or 1989 this division was renamed Empros and was later sold to Siemens
as CDC broke apart.
CDC's services business was spun off in 1992, and it became known as the Ceridian Corporation. Ceridian continues as a successful outsourced IT company focusing on human resources. In 1997 General Dynamics acquired the Computing Devices International Division of Ceridian. Computing Devices, headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota, was a defense electronics and systems integration business, originally Control Data's Government Systems Division.
convinced the Control Data management to spin off their Commercial Credit subsidiary. Over a period of years Weill used Commercial Credit to build an empire that became Citigroup
. In 1968, Commercial Credit Corporation was the target of a hostile takeover by Loews Inc. Loews had acquired nearly 10% of CCC, which it intended to break up on acquisition. To avoid the takeover CCC forged a deal with CDC lending them the money to purchase control in CCC instead, and "That is how a computer company came to own a fleet of fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay."
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited...
left the company to found Cray Research, Inc. (CRI). CDC was one of the nine major United States computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, Burroughs Corporation, DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
, NCR
NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation is an American technology company specializing in kiosk products for the retail, financial, travel, healthcare, food service, entertainment, gaming and public sector industries. Its main products are self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check...
, General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
, Honeywell
Honeywell
Honeywell International, Inc. is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments....
, RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
, and UNIVAC
UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
. CDC was well known and highly regarded throughout the industry at one time.
Background and origins: World War II–1957
During World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
the U.S. Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
had built up a team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery for both Japanese and German
Enigma machine
An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I...
electro-mechanical ciphers. A number of these were produced by a team dedicated to the task working in the Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, area. With the post-war wind-down of military spending the Navy grew increasingly worried that this team would break up and scatter into various companies, and it started looking for ways to covertly keep the team together.
Eventually they found their solution; the owner of a Chase Aircraft
Chase Aircraft
The Chase Aircraft Company, founded in 1943, was an aircraft manufacturer of the United States of America, primarily constructing gliders and military transport aircraft. Lacking space for expansion, the company was purchased by Henry J. Kaiser in 1951. Plans to produce the C-123 transport for the...
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, since it would have taken too long to get top secret clearance
Security clearance
A security clearance is a status granted to individuals allowing them access to classified information, i.e., state secrets, or to restricted areas after completion of a thorough background check. The term "security clearance" is also sometimes used in private organizations that have a formal...
. 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 give this team a home in his military glider
Military glider
Military gliders have been used by the military of various countries for carrying troops and heavy equipment to a combat zone, mainly during the Second World War. These engineless aircraft were towed into the air and most of the way to their target by military transport planes, e.g...
factory.
The result was Engineering Research Associates
Engineering Research Associates
Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. They became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were eventually purchased by Remington Rand and merged...
(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
Bit
A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...
ERA 1103. The machine was built for the Navy, which intended to use it in their "above board" code-breaking centers. In the early 1950s a minor political debate broke out in Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
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
Remington Rand
Remington Rand was an early American business machines manufacturer, best known originally as a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation as the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers but with antecedents in Remington Arms in the early nineteenth century. For a time, the...
.
Although Rand kept the ERA team together and developing new products, it was most interested in ERA's magnetic drum memory
Drum memory
Drum memory is a magnetic data storage device and was an early form of computer memory widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s, invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria....
systems. Rand soon merged with Sperry Corporation
Sperry Corporation
Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the twentieth century...
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, since the company was used primarily to provide engineering talent to support a variety of projects. However, one major project was moved from UNIVAC to ERA, the UNIVAC II
UNIVAC II
The UNIVAC II was an improvement to the UNIVAC I that UNIVAC first delivered in 1958. The improvements included core memory of 2000 to 10000 words, UNISERVO II tape drives which could use either the old UNIVAC I metal tapes or the new PET tapes, and some of the circuits were transistorized...
project, which led to lengthy delays and upsets to nearly everyone involved.
Since the Sperry "big company" mentality encroached on the decision-making powers of the ERA founders, they left Sperry to form the Control Data Corp. in 1957, setting up shop in an old warehouse down the road from Sperry in Minneapolis at 501 Park Avenue. Of the members forming CDC, William Norris
William Norris
William Charles Norris was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world...
was the unanimous choice to become the chief executive officer
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
of the new company. Seymour Cray
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited...
was likewise chosen to be the chief designer, but he was still in the process of completing an early version of the 1103-based Naval Tactical Data System
Naval Tactical Data System
Naval Tactical Data System, commonly NTDS, refers to a computerized information processing system developed by the United States Navy in the 1950s and first deployed in the early 1960s for use in combat ships.- Reason for development :...
(NTDS), and he did not leave Sperry to join CDC until it was complete.
Early designs and Cray's big plan
CDC started business by selling subsystems, mostly drum memory systems, to other companies. Cray joined the next year, and he immediately built a small transistorTransistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...
-based 6-bit machine known as the "CDC Little Character" to test his ideas on large-system design and transistor-based machines. "Little Character" was a success, and CDC soon released a 48-bit transistorized version of their 1103 re-design as the CDC 1604
CDC 1604
The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...
in 1959, with the first machine delivered to the U.S. Navy in 1960. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address (501 Park Avenue) to Cray's former project, the ERA-Univac 1103. A 12-bit cut-down version was also released as the CDC 160A
CDC 160A
The CDC 160 and CDC 160-A were 12-bit minicomputers built by Control Data Corporation from 1960 to 1965. The 160 was designed by Seymour Cray - reportedly over a long three-day weekend...
in 1960, arguably the first minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
. The 160A was particularly notable as it was built as a standard office desk item, which was a rather-unusual packaging for that era. New versions of the basic 1604 architecture were rebuilt into the CDC 3000
CDC 3000
The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s...
series, which sold through the early and mid-1960s.
Cray immediately turned to the design of a machine that would be the fastest (or in the terminology of the day, largest) machine in the world, setting the goal at 50 times the speed of the 1604. This required radical changes in design, and as the project "dragged on" — it had gone on for about four years by then — the management got increasingly upset and it demanded greater oversight. Cray in turn demanded (in 1962) to have his own remote lab, saying that otherwise, he would quit. Norris agreed, and Cray and his team moved to Cray's home town, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
Chippewa Falls is a city located on the Chippewa River in Chippewa County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 13,661 at the 2010 census. Incorporated as a city in 1869, it is the county seat of Chippewa County....
. Not even Bill Norris, the founder and president of CDC, could visit Cray's laboratory without an invitation. (See story of a salesman's uninvited visit to Chippewa Falls here.)
Peripherals business
Through the 1960s, Norris became increasingly worried that CDC had to develop a "critical mass" in order to compete with IBM. In order to do this, he started an aggressive program of buying up various companies to round out CDC's peripheral lineup. In general, they tried to offer a product to compete with any of IBM's, but running 10% faster and costing 10% less. This was not always easy to achieve.One of its first peripherals was a tape transport, which led to some internal wrangling as the Peripherals Equipment Division attempted to find a reasonable way to charge other divisions of the company for supplying the devices. If the division simply "gave" them away at cost as part of a system purchase, they would never have a real budget of their own. Instead, a plan was established in which it would share profits with the divisions selling its peripherals, a plan eventually used throughout the company.
The tape transport was followed by the 405 Card Reader
Punched card reader
A punched card reader or just card reader is a computer input device used to read data from punched cards. A card punch is a output device that punches holes in cards under computer control...
and the 415 Card Punch, followed by a series of tape drive
Tape drive
A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and performs digital recording, writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability.A tape drive provides...
s and drum printers, all of which were designed in-house. The printer business was initially supported by Holley Carburetor in the Rochester, Michigan
Rochester, Michigan
Rochester is an affluent city in north Oakland County in the U.S. state of Michigan on the northern outskirts of metro Detroit. The population was 12,711 at the 2010 census...
suburb outside of Detroit. They later formalized this by creating a jointly-held company, Holley Computer Products. Holley later sold its stake back to CDC, the remainder becoming the Rochester Division.
Norris was particularly interested in breaking out of the punched card
Punched card
A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...
–based workflow, where IBM held a stranglehold. He eventually decided to buy Rabinow Engineering, one of the pioneers of optical character recognition
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
(OCR) systems. The idea was to bypass the entire punched card stage by having the operators simply type onto normal paper pages with a "known" typewriter font, and then submit those pages to the computer. Since a typewritten page contains much more information than a punched card (which has essentially one line of text from a page), this would offer savings all around. Unfortunately, this seemingly-simple task turned out to be much harder than anyone expected, and while CDC became a major player in the early days of OCR systems, it has remained a niche product to this day. Rabinow's plant in Rockville, MD was closed in 1976, and CDC left the business.
With the continued delays on the OCR project, it became clear that punched cards were not going to go away any time soon, and CDC had to address this as quickly as possible. Although the 405 remained in production, it was an expensive machine to build. So another purchase was made, Bridge Engineering, which offered a line of lower-cost as well as higher-speed card punches. All card-handling products were moved to what became the Valley Forge Division after Bridge moved to a new factory, with the tape transports to follow. Later on, the Valley Forge and Rochester divisions were spun off to form a new joint company with National Cash Register (later NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation is an American technology company specializing in kiosk products for the retail, financial, travel, healthcare, food service, entertainment, gaming and public sector industries. Its main products are self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check...
), Computer Peripherals Inc
Computer Peripherals Inc
Computer Peripherals, Inc. was an American manufacturer of computer printers, based in Rochester, Michigan.CPI's precursor, Holley Computer Products, was formed as a joint venture between Control Data Corporation and the Holley Carburetor Company in April 1962. Holley developed and produced a...
(CPI), in order to share development and production costs across the two companies. ICL later joined the effort. Eventually the Rochester Division was sold to Centronics
Centronics
Centronics Data Computer Corporation was a pioneering American manufacturer of computer printers, now remembered primarily for the parallel interface that bears its name.-The beginning:Centronics began as a division of Wang Laboratories...
in 1982.
Another side-effect of Norris's attempts to diversify was the creation of a number of service bureau
Service bureau
A service bureau is a company which provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Customers of service bureaus typically do not have the scale or expertise to incorporate these...
s that ran jobs on behalf of smaller companies that could not afford to buy computers. This was never very profitable, and in 1965, several managers suggested that the unprofitable centers be closed in a cost-cutting measure. Nevertheless, Norris was so convinced of the idea that he refused to accept this, and ordered an across-the-board "belt tightening" instead.
CDC 6600: defining supercomputing
CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...
, out-performing everything on the market by roughly ten times. The 6600 had a CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
(Central Processing Unit) with multiple, asynchronous functional units, and it used 10 logical, external I/O processors to off-load many common tasks. That way the CPU could devote all of its time and circuitry to processing actual data, while the other controllers dealt with the mundane tasks like punching cards and running disk drives. Using late-model compiler
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
s, the machine attained a standard mathematical operations rate of 500 kilo-FLOPS
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
, but handcrafted computer assemblies delivered about 1.0 mega-FLOPS. A simpler, much slower, and much less expensive version, implemented using a more traditional serial processor design rather than the 6600's parallel functional units, was released as the CDC 6400
CDC 6400
The CDC 6400, a member of the CDC 6000 series, was a mainframe computer made by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. The central processing unit was architecturally compatible with the CDC 6600...
, and a two-processor version of the 6400 was called the CDC 6500. Cray turned to an even faster machine built along different lines, then known as the 6800.
A Fortran compiler known as MNF (Minnesota Fortran) was developed by Lawrence A. Liddiard and E. James Mundstock at the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
for the 6600.
It was after the delivery of the 6600 that IBM took notice of this new company. At the time, Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
Thomas John Watson, Jr. was an American businessman, political figure, and philanthropist. He was the 2nd president of IBM , the 11th national president of the Boy Scouts of America , and the 16th United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union...
asked (words to the effect of) How is it that this tiny company of 34 people — including the janitor — can be beating us when we have thousands of people?, to which Cray reportedly quipped You just answered your own question. In 1965, IBM started an effort to build its own machine that would be even faster than the 6600, the ACS-1
ACS-1
The ACS-1 and ACS-360 are two related supercomputers designed by IBM as part of the IBM Advanced Computing Systems project from 1961 to 1969...
. Two hundred people were gathered together on the U.S. West Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
to work on the project, away from corporate prodding, in an attempt to mirror Cray's off-site lab. The project produced interesting computer architecture and technology, but it was not compatible with IBM's very successful System/360
System/360
The IBM System/360 was a mainframe computer system family first announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and sold between 1964 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover the complete range of applications, from small to large, both commercial and scientific...
line of computers. The computer-makers were directed to make it IBM-360-compatible, but that compromised its performance. The ACS was canceled in 1969, no product was ever produced. Many of the engineers left the company, leading to a brain-drain in IBM's high-performance departments.
In the meantime, IBM announced a new version of the famed System/360, the Model 92, which would be just as fast as CDC's 6600. This machine did not exist, but its nonexistence did not stop sales of the 6600 from drying up, while people waited for the release of the mythical Model 92. Norris did not take this tactic, dubbed as fear, uncertainty and doubt
Fear, uncertainty and doubt
Fear, uncertainty and doubt, frequently abbreviated as FUD, is a tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda....
(FUD), lying down, and in an extensive antitrust
Antitrust
The United States antitrust law is a body of laws that prohibits anti-competitive behavior and unfair business practices. Antitrust laws are intended to encourage competition in the marketplace. These competition laws make illegal certain practices deemed to hurt businesses or consumers or both,...
lawsuit launched against IBM a year later, he eventually won a settlement valued at $80 million. He picked up IBM's subsidiary Service Bureau Corporation (SBC), which ran computer processing for other corporations on its own computers. SBC fit nicely into CDC's existing service bureau offerings.
During the designing of the 6600, CDC had set up Project SPIN to supply the system with a high speed hard disk
Hard disk
A hard disk drive is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic data storage device. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the...
memory system. At the time, it was unclear if disks would replace magnetic memory drums, nor was it clear at the time whether fixed or removable disks would become the more prevalent. Thus, SPIN explored all of these approaches, and eventually it delivered a very large 28" diameter fixed disk and also a smaller multi-platter 14" removable disk-pack system. Over time, the hard disk business pioneered in SPIN would turn into a major product line.
CDC 7600 and 8600
In the same month it won its lawsuit against IBM, CDC also announced its new computer, the CDC 7600CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
(previously referred to as the 6800 within CDC). This machine's hardware clock speed was almost four times that of the 6600 (36 MHz vs. 10 MHz), and it offered considerably more than four times the total throughput. Much of this speed increase was due to extensive use of pipelining
Instruction pipeline
An instruction pipeline is a technique used in the design of computers and other digital electronic devices to increase their instruction throughput ....
, a technique that allows different parts of the CPU to work simultaneously on different parts of successive instructions of the process at the same time (in the same way that an automotive assembly line can produce one vehicle every 90 seconds, and thus easily 300 vehicles per 8 hour shift by doing a partial assembly of each vehicle simultaneously every 90 seconds, while any one vehicle will take several hours to be completely assembled). With this technique, the time to run any particular instruction is no faster, but the program as a whole moves through the computer more quickly since the instructions are queued in an efficient manner.
The 7600 did not do well in the marketplace because it was introduced in the 1969 downturn in the U.S. national economy. Its complexity had led to poor reliability. The machine was slightly incompatible with the 6000-series, so it required a completely different operating system, which like most new OSs, was primitive. The 7600 project paid for itself, yet it damaged CDC's reputation.
Cray then turned to the design of the CDC 8600
CDC 8600
The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while working for the Control Data Corporation. The "natural successor" to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the fastest computer on the market.Development started in...
. This design included four processors in a single, smaller case. The smaller size and shorter signal paths allowed the 8600 to run at much higher clock speeds, and in combination with higher speed memory, these features provided most of the performance gains. The 8600, however, belonged to the "old school" in terms of its physical construction, and it used individual components soldered to circuit boards. The design was so compact that cooling and servicing the CPU modules proved effectively impossible. Because of too many hot-running solder joints in it that the machines did not work reliably, Cray recognized that a re-design was needed.
The STAR and the Cyber
In addition to the redesign of the 8600, CDC had another project called the CDC STAR-100CDC STAR-100
The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation . It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications....
underway, led by Cray's former collaborator on the 6600/7600, Jim Thornton. Unlike the 8600's "four computers in one box" solution to the speed problem, the STAR was a new design using a unit that we know today as the vector processor
Vector processor
A vector processor, or array processor, is a central processing unit that implements an instruction set containing instructions that operate on one-dimensional arrays of data called vectors. This is in contrast to a scalar processor, whose instructions operate on single data items...
. By highly pipelining math instructions with purpose-built instructions and hardware, math processing is dramatically improved in a machine that was otherwise slower than a 7600. Although the particular set of problems it would be best at solving was limited - in comparison to the general-purpose 7600, it was for solving exactly these problems that customers would buy CDC machines.
Since these two projects competed for limited funds during the late 1960s, Norris felt that the company could not support simultaneous development of the STAR and a complete redesign of the 8600. Therefore, Cray left CDC to form the Cray Research company in 1972. Norris remained, however, a staunch supporter of Cray, and he even invested money into Cray's new company. In 1974, CDC released the STAR, designated as the Cyber 203. It turned out to have "real world" performance that was considerably worse than expected. STAR's chief designer, Jim Thornton, then left CDC to form the Network Systems Corporation
Network Systems Corporation
Network Systems Corporation was an early manufacturer of high-performance computer networking products. Founded in 1974, NSC produced hardware products that connected IBM and Control Data Corporation mainframe computers to peripherals at remote locations...
.
A variety of systems based on the basic 6600/7600 architecture were repackaged in different price/performance categories of the CDC Cyber
CDC Cyber
The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, which became CDC's main product line in the 1970s. An updated version of the STAR architecture, the Cyber 205, had considerably better performance than the original. By this time, however, Cray's own designs, like the Cray-1
Cray-1
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976, and it went on to become one of the best known and most successful supercomputers in history...
, were using the same basic design techniques as the STAR, but were computing much faster.
Sales of the STAR were weak, but Control Data Corp. produced a successor system, the Cyber 200/205, that gave Cray Research some competition. CDC also embarked on a number of special projects for its clients, who produced an even smaller number of black project
Black project
In the United States and United Kingdom, a black project is in the vernacular a classified military/defense project, unacknowledged publicly by the government, military personnel, and defense contractors. Examples of U.S...
computers. The CDC Advanced Flexible Processor (AFP), also known as CYBER PLUS, was one such machine.
Another design direction was the "Cyber 80" project, which was aimed at release in 1980. This machine could run old 6600-style programs, and also had a completely new 64-bit architecture. The concept behind Cyber 80 was that current 6000-series users would migrate to these machines with relative ease. The design and debugging of these machines went on past 1980, and the machines were eventually released under other names.
CDC was also attempting to diversify its revenue from hardware into services and this included its promotion of the PLATO (computer system) computer-aided learning system, which ran on Cyber hardware and incorporated many early computer interface innovations including bit-mapped touchscreen terminals.
ETA Systems, hard disks, oblivion
CDC decided to fight for the high-performance niche, but Norris recognized that the company had become moribund in his opinion and unable to quickly design competitive machines. So in 1983, he set up a spinoff company, ETA SystemsETA Systems
ETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun off from Control Data Corporation in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered an excellent machine, the ETA-10, but lost money continually while doing so...
, whose design goal being a machine processing data at 10 GFLOPs, about 40 times the speed of the Cray-1. The design never fully matured, and it was unable to reach its goals. Nevertheless, the product was one of the fastest computers on the market, and a handful of those computers were sold during the next few years. The effort ended after half-hearted attempts to sell ETA Systems. In 1989, most of the employees of ETA Systems were laid off, and the remaining ones were folded into CDC.
Meanwhile, several very large Japanese manufacturing firms were entering the market. The supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
market was too small to be able to afford more than a handful of companies, so CDC started looking for other markets. One of these was the high-performance hard disk drive market, which was becoming more lucrative as personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s (PCs) began to include them in the mid-1980s. Through its Magnetic Peripherals unit, originally a joint venture with Honeywell
Honeywell
Honeywell International, Inc. is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments....
and Honeywell Bull, CDC became a major player in the hard disk drive market. It was the world wide leader in 14 inch disk drive technology in the OEM
Original Equipment Manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
marketplace in the 1970s and early 1980s especially with its SMD (Storage Module Drive) and CMD (Cartridge Module Drive). CDC was an early developer of the eight-inch drive technology that was pioneered by Shugart Associates
Shugart Associates
Shugart Associates was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the 5¼-inch minifloppy disk drive....
with products from its MPI Oklahoma City Operation. Its CDC Wren series drives were particularly popular with "high end" users, although it was behind the capacity growth and performance curves of numerous startups such a Micropolis, Atasi, Maxtor, and Quantum. CDC also co-developed the now universal Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) interface with Compaq
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation is a personal computer company founded in 1982. Once the largest supplier of personal computing systems in the world, Compaq existed as an independent corporation until 2002, when it was acquired for US$25 billion by Hewlett-Packard....
and Western Digital
Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation is one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world. It has a long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit maker and a storage products company. Western Digital was founded on April 23, 1970 by Alvin B...
, which was aimed at lowering the cost of adding low-performance drives.
Inexplicably, CDC exited the hard disk drive business entirely in 1988, spinning off Magnetic Peripherals under the name Imprimis. The next year, Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives. Incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology, Seagate is currently incorporated in Dublin, Ireland and has its principal executive offices in Scotts Valley, California, United States.-1970s:On November 1, 1979...
, which had been seriously lagging in the high-end drive market, purchased Imprimis. The remainder of CDC was renamed Control Data Systems, Inc. and was bought out by Syntegra (USA), a subsidiary of the BT Group
BT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
, and merged into BT's Global Services organization.
CDC's Energy Management Division was one of the most successful CDC business units, providing control systems solutions that managed as much as 25% of all electricity on the planet. In 1988 or 1989 this division was renamed Empros and was later sold to Siemens
Siemens
Siemens may refer toSiemens, a German family name carried by generations of telecommunications industrialists, including:* Werner von Siemens , inventor, founder of Siemens AG...
as CDC broke apart.
CDC's services business was spun off in 1992, and it became known as the Ceridian Corporation. Ceridian continues as a successful outsourced IT company focusing on human resources. In 1997 General Dynamics acquired the Computing Devices International Division of Ceridian. Computing Devices, headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota, was a defense electronics and systems integration business, originally Control Data's Government Systems Division.
Commercial Credit Corporation
In 1986, Sandy WeillSanford I. Weill
Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill is an American banker, financier and philanthropist. He is a former chief executive officer and chairman of Citigroup. He served in those positions until October 1, 2003, and April 18, 2006, respectively....
convinced the Control Data management to spin off their Commercial Credit subsidiary. Over a period of years Weill used Commercial Credit to build an empire that became Citigroup
Citigroup
Citigroup Inc. or Citi is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Citigroup was formed from one of the world's largest mergers in history by combining the banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate...
. In 1968, Commercial Credit Corporation was the target of a hostile takeover by Loews Inc. Loews had acquired nearly 10% of CCC, which it intended to break up on acquisition. To avoid the takeover CCC forged a deal with CDC lending them the money to purchase control in CCC instead, and "That is how a computer company came to own a fleet of fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay."
Timeline of CDC systems releases
- 1957 — Founding
- 1959 — 1604CDC 1604The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...
- 1960 — 1604-B
- 1961 — 160
- 1962 — 924
- 1963 — 160ACDC 160AThe CDC 160 and CDC 160-A were 12-bit minicomputers built by Control Data Corporation from 1960 to 1965. The 160 was designed by Seymour Cray - reportedly over a long three-day weekend...
, 1604-A, 3400, 6600CDC 6600The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times... - 1964 — 160-G, 3100CDC 3000The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s...
, 3200CDC 3000The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s...
, 3600CDC 3000The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s...
, 6400CDC 6400The CDC 6400, a member of the CDC 6000 series, was a mainframe computer made by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. The central processing unit was architecturally compatible with the CDC 6600... - 1965 — 1604-C, 1700CDC 1700The CDC 1700 was a 16-bit word minicomputer, manufactured by the Control Data Corporation with deliveries beginning in May, 1966. The 1700 used ones' complement arithmetic and an ASCII-based character set, and supported memory write protection on an individual word basis...
, 3300CDC 3000The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s...
, 3500CDC 3000The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s...
, 8050, 8090 - 1966 — 3800CDC 3000The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s...
, 6200, 6500, STATION 6000 - 1968 — 7600CDC 7600The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
- 1969 — 6700
- 1970 — STAR-100CDC STAR-100The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation . It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications....
- 1971 — CYBER 71CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 72CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 73CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 74CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 76CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing... - 1972 — 5600, 8600
- 1973 — CYBER 170CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 172CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 173CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 174CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 175CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, SYSTEM 17CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing... - 1976 — CYBER 18CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
- 1977 — CYBER 171CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, CYBER 176CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
, OMEGA/480CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing... - 1979 — CYBER 203, CYBER 720, CYBER 730, CYBER 740, CYBER 750, CYBER 760
- 1980 — CYBER 205
- 1982 — CYBER 815, CYBER 825, CYBER 835, CYBER 845, CYBER 855, CYBER 865, CYBER 875
- 1983 — ETA10ETA10The ETA10 was a line of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by ETA Systems, a spin-off division of Control Data Corporation . The ETA10 was announced in 1986, with the first deliveries made in early 1987...
- 1984 — CYBER 810, CYBER 830, CYBER 840, CYBER 850, CYBER 860, CYBER 990, CYBERPLUS
- 1987 — CYBER 910, CYBER 930, CYBER 995
- 1988 — CYBER 960
- 1989 — CYBER 920, CYBER 2000
Film and science fiction references
- The pilot episode of The Six Million Dollar ManThe Six Million Dollar ManThe Six Million Dollar Man is an American television series about a former astronaut with bionic implants working for the OSI...
, "The Moon and the Desert", featured computers in the O.S.I. laboratory, emblasoned with the CDC "Control Data" badge. - Colossus: The Forbin ProjectColossus: The Forbin ProjectColossus: The Forbin Project is an American science fiction thriller film. It is based upon the 1966 novel Colossus, by Dennis Feltham Jones, about a massive American defense computer, named Colossus, becoming sentient and deciding to assume control of the world.-Plot:Dr. Charles A...
— The title sequences to this film include tape drives and other early CDC equipment. - The Thief Who Came to DinnerThe Thief Who Came to DinnerThe Thief Who Came to Dinner is a 1973 comedy film directed by Bud Yorkin and based on the novel by Terrence Lore Smith. The film stars Ryan O'Neal and Jacqueline Bisset, with Charles Cioffi, Warren Oates, and in an early appearance, Jill Clayburgh....
, 1973 by Terrence Lore Smith and Walter Hill — Ryan O'Neal plays a bored Control Data employee who decides to retire and turn to a life of crime, but breaks back in to use the computers to help him in a game of chess with the detective who is on his trail. - The Adolescence of P-1The Adolescence of P-1The Adolescence of P-1 is a 1977 science fiction novel by Thomas J. Ryan, published by Macmillan Publishing, and in 1984 adapted into a Canadian-made TV film entitled "Hide and Seek". It features a hacker who creates an artificial intelligence named P-1, which goes rogue and takes over computers in...
, by Thomas Ryan — Control Data computers were very enticing to young P-1. - TronTron-Film:*Tron , a franchise that began in 1982 with the Walt Disney Pictures film Tron** Tron , a 1982 science fiction film by Disney, starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan, Dan Shor and David Warner...
— In the wide screen version of the film, when Flynn and Lora sneak into Encom, a CDC 7600CDC 7600The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
is visible in the background, alongside a Cray-1Cray-1The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976, and it went on to become one of the best known and most successful supercomputers in history...
. This scene was shot at the Lawrence Livermore National LaboratoryLawrence Livermore National LaboratoryThe Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952...
. - Die HardDie HardDie Hard is a 1988 American action film and the first in the Die Hard film series. The film was directed by John McTiernan and written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza. It is based on a 1979 novel by Roderick Thorp titled Nothing Lasts Forever, itself a sequel to the book The Detective, which...
— The computer room shot up by one of the terrorists contained a number of working Cyber 180CDC CyberThe CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
computers and a mock-up of an ETA-10 supercomputer, along with a number of other peripheral devices, all provided by CDC Demonstration Services/Benchmark Lab. This equipment was requested on short notice after another computer manufacturer backed out at the last minute. Paul Derby, manager of the Benchmark Lab, arranged to send two van-loads of equipment to Hollywood for the shoot, accompanied by Jerry Stearns of the Benchmark Lab who watched over this equipment. After the machines were returned to Minnesota, they were inspected and tested, and as each machine was sold, a notation was made in the corporate records that the machine had appeared in the film. - The New Avengers — In episode #23 ("Complex") Purdey uses a CDC card reader.
- They LiveThey LiveThey Live is a 1988 science fiction/horror film directed by John Carpenter, who also wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Frank Armitage ....
, by John Carpenter — As Roddy Piper is trying on his new "sunglasses" that allow him to see the world as it is, he looks at an advertisement for Control Data Corporation and sees the word OBEY. The film's credits include "special thanks" to CDC. - Mi-SexMi-SexMi-Sex was a New Zealand new wave rock band active from 1978 to 1984. Led by Steve Gilpin as vocalist, they were best known for their singles "Computer Games" in 1979 and "People" in 1980.-History:...
— Computer Games: 1979 pop music video. The band enters the computer room in the Control Data North Sydney building and proceeds to play with CDC equipment.
External links
- Control Data Corporation Records at the Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; CDC records donated by Ceridian Corporation in 1991; finding guide contains historical timeline, product timeline, and acquisitions list. - Oral history interview with William Norris discusses ERAEngineering Research AssociatesEngineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. They became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were eventually purchased by Remington Rand and merged...
years, acquisition of ERA by Remington RandRemington RandRemington Rand was an early American business machines manufacturer, best known originally as a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation as the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers but with antecedents in Remington Arms in the early nineteenth century. For a time, the...
, the Univac File computer, work as head of the Univac Division, and the formation of CDC. Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. - Oral history interview with Willis K. Drake Discusses Remington-Rand, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, ERAEngineering Research AssociatesEngineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. They became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were eventually purchased by Remington Rand and merged...
, and formation of Control Data Corporation. Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. - Oral history with Richard D. Conner Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Conner discusses CDC's social programs and employee assistance programs. - Two early oral history interviews with Robert Price Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. - Oral history interview with Eugene L. Baker Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Baker discusses CDC's social and employee programs. - Oral history interview with Norbert R. Berg Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota. Berg discusses the development of CDC's employee assistance programs. - Oral history interview with Mike Schumacher discusses the development of operating and applications software for the CDC 1604CDC 1604The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...
and later Control Data Corporation computers. Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. - Oral history interview with Charles F. Crichton discusses the history of data services at Control Data Corporation. Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. - Organized discussion moderated by Neil R. Lincoln with eighteen Control Data Corporation (CDC) engineers on computer architecture and design. Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Engineers include Robert Moe, Wayne Specker, Dennis Grinna, Tom Rowan, Maurice Hutson, Curt Alexander, Don Pagelkopf, Maris Bergmanis, Dolan Toth, Chuck Hawley, Larry Krueger, Mike Pavlov, Dave Resnick, Howard Krohn, Bill Bhend, Kent Steiner, Raymon Kort, and Neil R. Lincoln. Discussion topics include CDC 1604CDC 1604The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...
, CDC 6600CDC 6600The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...
, CDC 7600CDC 7600The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
, CDC 8600CDC 8600The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while working for the Control Data Corporation. The "natural successor" to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the fastest computer on the market.Development started in...
, CDC STAR-100CDC STAR-100The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation . It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications....
and Seymour CraySeymour CraySeymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited...
. - Information about the spin out of Commercial Credit from Control Data by Sandy Weill
- Information about the Control Data CDC 3800 Computer—on display at the National Air and Space MuseumNational Air and Space MuseumThe National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution holds the largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world. It was established in 1976. Located in Washington, D.C., United States, it is a center for research into the history and science of aviation and...
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International AirportWashington Dulles International AirportWashington Dulles International Airport is a public airport in Dulles, Virginia, 26 miles west of downtown Washington, D.C. The airport serves the Baltimore-Washington-Northern Virginia metropolitan area centered on the District of Columbia. It is named after John Foster Dulles, Secretary of...
. - Private Collection of historical documents about CDC
- Control Data User Manuals Library @ Computing History
- Computing history describing the use of a range of CDC systems and equipment 1970-1985
- A German collection of CDC, Cray and other large computer systems, some of them in operation