Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers

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.

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.