CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 was an early supercomputer manufactured by the Control Data Corporation. Designed by the legendary Seymour R. Cray, the CDC 6600 was first announced in 1964 and sold for around 7 million dollars. A total of 50 of these machines were produced, (with the first one currently residing in the Computer Museum History Center).

This computer ran on a total of 11 processors, and had 65,000 60-bit words of memory. The 6600 had a clock speed of 100 nanoseconds which was the the worlds fastest in 1964. This was also the first computer to use a crt console, (and some of the first ever computer games ran on the CDC 6600). All of this made for a hot computer, so hot that it had to be cooled by freon.

The 6600 could be programmed by punch cards or seven-channel digital magnetic tape. Output included 2 printers, a plotter, a card punch, magnetic tape, and the display console.

The Scope Operating System ran things from the software end of things. One downfall to that was that the OS expected a time limit parameter on all jobs. This had to be listed in octal seconds. This combined with another quirk made 77,777 (octal), the largest amount of time that you could request. This was a very early case of someone thinking along the lines of, "How could they ever need that much memory, time, drive space, etc".