Control Data Corporation

Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a supercomputer firm. 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 the time. For most of the 1960s, Seymour Cray worked at CDC and developed a series of machines that were the fastest computers in the world by far, until Cray left the company to found Cray Research (CRI) in the 1970s. After several years of losses in the early 1980s, in 1988 CDC started to leave the computer manufacturing business and sell the related parts of the company, a process that was completed in 1992 with the creation of Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining businesses of CDC currently operate as Ceridian.

Background and origins: World War II–1957

During World War II 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.

CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 was the flagship mainframe supercomputer of the 6000 series of computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. The first CDC 6600 was delivered in 1965 to the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, where it was used to analyse the two to three million photographs of bubble-chamber tracks that CERN experiments were producing every year. In 1966 another CDC 6600 was delivered to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, part of the University of California at Berkeley, where it was used for the analysis of nuclear events photographed inside the Alvarez bubble chamber. The CDC 6600 is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, the IBM 7030 Stretch, roughly by a factor of three. With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.

A CDC 6600 is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.