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From: mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 16:59:37 +0000
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On Tue, 20 May 2025 10:45:18 +0000, Michael S wrote:

> On Mon, 19 May 2025 23:58:16 -0000 (UTC)
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 19 May 2025 16:55:49 +0300, Michael S wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 19 May 2025 01:56:50 -0000 (UTC)
>>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> They were orders of magnitude faster than anything from IBM.
>>>
>>> That sounds like exaggeration.
>>
>> Thomas Watson Jr, boss of IBM, sent out the following memo after the
>> 1963 Business Week feature on CDC and the forthcoming 6600:
>>
>>     Last week Control Data had a press conference during which they
>>     officially announced their 6600 system. I understand that in the
>>     laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people,
>>     including the janitor. Of these, 14 are engineers and 4 are
>>     programmers, and only one person has a Ph.D., a relatively junior
>>     programmer. Contrasting this modest effort with our own vast
>>     development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our
>>     industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the
>>     world’s most powerful computer.
>>
>
> 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".

Perhaps a full binary order of magnitude:: 2×

>          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.
> Or not, I don't really know.
>
>>>> They pioneered the very concept of a “supercomputer”.
>>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch
>>
>> Let’s just say, the 7030 was just the start of a long IBM tradition
>> of over-promising and under-delivering.
>
> It is true that IBM was over-promising und under-delivering with 7030.
> It does not change the fact that it was called "supercomputer" and that
> despite under-delivery until introduction of 6600 it was the fastest
> computer in the world.