Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers

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:
 

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.
 

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.
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 “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.

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.