Re: Chipsandcheese article on the CDC6600

On Mon, 22 Jul 2024 13:41:40 +0000
mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) wrote:

On Mon, 22 Jul 2024 10:08:27 +0000, Michael S wrote:
 

On Mon, 22 Jul 2024 10:43:44 +0300
Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> wrote:
 

On 2024-07-22 3:05, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: 

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 22:21:41 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:
 

IBM CEO said something to the effect:: How can a team of 24
people, including the janitor, beat IBM ?? 

>
 From Watson’s memo:
>
     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. 

>
>
Per Wikipedia, Cray's reply was sardonic: "It seems like Mr. Watson
has answered his own question."
>
>
 

>
At the end, the influence of 6600 on computers we use today is
close to zero. 

 
CDC 6600 had a RISC instruction set !!
>

It has RISC-like features, most importantly load-store architecture.
Simple instruction formats and only two instruction width options also
sound RISCy. But hard coupling between A registers and X registers does
not look like RISC to me.
May be, I didn't think enough about it.

Anyway, it seems to me that modern RISC was re-invented more or less
from scratch in the late 70s and influence of 6600 architecture likely
didn't play major role in that process.