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From: Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 13:45:18 +0300
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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:
>=20
> > On Mon, 19 May 2025 01:56:50 -0000 (UTC)
> > Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> >  =20
> >> They were orders of magnitude faster than anything from IBM. =20
> >=20
> > That sounds like exaggeration. =20
>=20
> Thomas Watson Jr, boss of IBM, sent out the following memo after the
> 1963 Business Week feature on CDC and the forthcoming 6600:
>=20
>     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=E2=80=99s most powerful computer.
>=20

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.=20
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 =E2=80=9Csupercomputer=E2=80=9D.
> >>  =20
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch =20
>=20
> Let=E2=80=99s just say, the 7030 was just the start of a long IBM traditi=
on
> 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.