CDC's first products were based on the machines designed at ERA, which Seymour Cray had been asked to update after moving to CDC. After an experimental machine known as the Little Character, in 1960 … See more

The basis for the 6600 CPU is what would later be called a RISC system, one in which the processor is tuned to do instructions which are comparatively simple and have limited and well … See more

The CDC 7600 was originally intended to be fully compatible with the existing 6000-series machines as well; it started life known as the CDC 6800. But during its design, the designers determined that maintaining complete compatibility with the existing 6000-series … See more

Typical machines of the era used a single Central processing unit (CPU) to drive the entire system. A typical program would first load data into memory (often using pre-rolled library code), process it, and then write it back out. This required the CPUs to be fairly … See more

The CPU could only execute a limited number of simple instructions. A typical CPU of the era had a complex instruction set, which included instructions to handle all the normal … See more

There was a sore point with the 6600 operating system support — slipping timelines. The machines originally ran a very simple job-control system known as COS (Chippewa Operating System), which was quickly "thrown together" based on the earlier See more

• History of supercomputing See more