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From: Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 20:11:14 +0300
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On Wed, 21 May 2025 16:09:13 -0000 (UTC)
John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

> According to Michael S  <already5chosen@yahoo.com>:
> >> According to Michael S  <already5chosen@yahoo.com>:  
> >> >At time of introduction CDC 6600 was undoubtedly much faster both
> >> >than older [more expensive] IBM 7030 and than contemporary
> >> >[significantly less expensive] S/360 Model 50. But it was not
> >> >"orders of magnitude faster". Not even one order of magnitude
> >> >faster, except, may be, vs Model 50 in artificial very
> >> >memory-light floating-point intensive scenarios. 
> >> >High end S/360 (Model 65) came about half a year later. I would
> >> >imagine that for non-floating-point code it had about the same
> >> >speed as 6600.    
> >> 
> >> Those 360 models seem wrong.  The 360/50 was a midrange machine
> >> that shipped in August 1965, the /65 was a large machine that
> >> shipped in November 1964,   
> >
> >Do you mean, November 1965?  
> 
> Yes, of course, I can't type.
> 
> >> and the 360/75 was a high end machine that
> >> shipped in January 1966.  They were all announced at the same
> >> time, give or take IBM's replacing the paper 60 and 70 with the 
> >> faster 65 and 75.  
> >
> >Sorry, I did not read Wikipedia articles about /50 and /65 with
> >sufficient attention and confused announcement with shipment. Didn't
> >realize that for /50 the time between announcement and shipment was
> >much longer than for /65.  
> 
> With that correction, only three months which doesn't seem like much.
> The physical planning for power and cooling and raised floors and
> such to be ready for delivery would take longer than that.
> 

According to Wikipedia:
Model Announcement Shipment A-to-S
50    1964-04      1965-08  18 months
65    1965-04      1965-11   7 months

> >W.r.t. CDC 6600 Wikipedia article does not state an exact date of the
> >1st shipment at all, just saying that it was in 1965.  
> 
> Says here late 1964. It was a huge embarassment to IBM. I imagine a
> large part of that was that it blew up IBM's longstanding belief that
> you had to make a computer really complicated to make it fast, viz.
> STRETCH and 360/91.  
> 
> https://mncomputinghistory.com/control-data-corporation/
> 

Probably, mncomputinghistory and Wikipedia have different definitions
of delivery. 

> IBM sort of came around to that with the 360/44, which implemented a
> scientific subset of the 360's instruction set and ran nearly as fast
> as a /65. It was intended for process control so they added priority
> interrupts and some real time I/O.