CDC thingy (was Re: About the Wang '669 patent)

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Sat Apr 25 10:01:21 1998

> I saw a CDC demo of that once circa 1974, as I recall it was
> called "Plato", used a nice orange plasma display, limited
> animation, astronomical price. CDC had grandiose plans it would
> be used in schools, like every high school in the country could
> afford a $2 million CDC 6600 to support it.

I think Plato ran on smaller platforms as well.

> Kinda sad actually,
> once Cray left CDC they didn't have a clue as to what to do
> afterwards, the big iron Cyber 6000s went nowhere, the company
> wound up running payroll services (the remnants of CDC are now
> known as Ceridian, a batch payroll services company).

I do not know if I would say "went nowhere" - the line survived, at least
as an evolution, until the late 1970s. They made CDC money for a little
while, anyway.

Most CDC machines have always been very fast (often the fastest of the
day) and tough, but always a bit behind the times. They refused to upgrade
the line in key areas, most notably their addressing range. In the late
1970s, management finally realized this and the Cyber 180 was born - a
fast mainframe that actually was innovative and modern, but way too late.

I think Seymour Cray was a bit to blame as well, as his machines were also
very fast, but lacking in some areas. The Cray-1s have quite a limitted
memory, and no virtual memory behind it, making problems with very large
sets of data difficult. The Cray-2s have a very poor method of
interprocessor communication. Having Chen look over Cray's designs,
resulting in the X/MP and Y/MP (and C90s, T90s, etc.), was the key,
resulting in a family of first-class machines.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Sat Apr 25 1998 - 10:01:21 BST