Control Data Corporation





Control Data Corporation (or CDC) is one of the pioneering supercomputer
firms. For most of the 1960s they built the fastest computers in the world,
by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s. They were well known and highly
regarded throughout the industry at one time, but today are largely forgotten.

CDC was originally formed by thirteen members of the Sperry Rand Univac
computer division. They had originally been the founding members of another
company, Engineering Research Associates, who had formed to build
code-breaking machinery for the US Navy. The company was purchased by Sperry
Rand in 1952 after a series of political debates about the Navy essentially
"owning" ERA, and Sperry was quick to use their drum memory products in
other lines. It was not long before the core of the ERA team got fed up with
Sperry Rand and decamped.

Of the members forming CDC, William Norris was the unanimous choice to
become CEO, and Seymour Cray as their chief engineer. CDC started business
by selling parts, mostly drum systems, to other companies.

Meanwhile they were also designing their own computer under the leadership
of Cray. This design was eventually released as the CDC 1604 in 1958, with
the first delivered to the US Navy in 1960. At the time it was one of the
most powerful computers in the world, as well as one of the first to be
built primarily from transistors.

However this was only the starting point. Cray had already moved on to the
design of what would become the CDC 6600, a machine of far greater power.
The 6600 had a simple CPU, but used a series of external I/O processors to
offload many common tasks. That way the CPU could devote all of its time and
circuitry to processing data while the other controllers dealt with mundane
tasks like punching cards and running disks which would otherwise tie up the CPU.

The 6600 completely outperformed all machines on the market, typically by
over ten times. It retained this leadership position until 1969 when it was
finally outdone by its own designer. Using late-model compilers the machine
still racks up .5 MFlops, impressive considering that it is about 30 years old.

It was at this point that IBM took notice. At the time Thomas Watson asked
(paraphrased) how is it that this tiny company of 20 people can be beating
us when we have thousands of people?, to which Cray replied you just
answered your own question.

In 1965 IBM started an effort to build their own machine that would be even
faster than the 6600, the ASCC. 200 people were sent to the west coast to
run the project away from corporate prodding, at which point nothing
happened. ASCC was eventually cancelled in 1969 after producing nothing, and
190 of the 200 employees stayed on the coast rather than suffer being
recalled to IBM in New York.

But in the short term IBM also went ahead and announced a new version of the
famed System/360 that would be just as fast as the 6600. This machine didn't
exist, but that didn't stop sales of the 6600 drying up while people waited
for its release – a tactic known today as FUD and more commonly
associated with Microsoft. Norris didn't take this lying down, and a year
later filed an anti-trust suit against IBM, eventually winning over 600
million dollars and picking up several parts of IBM's empire in the process.

The same month they won they also announced their own new machine, the CDC
7600. Cray had started the design quite a bit earlier and allowed it to
mature fully. This machine ran at about five times the speed of the 6600,
yet it was almost perfectly backward compatible. Much of this speed increase
was due to extensive use of pipelining, a technique that allows different
parts of the CPU to work on different parts of the instruction processs at
the same time.

Once again Cray had started the next design before the last shipped. The CDC
8600 was to be a 4-processor unit in a case much smaller than the 7600 it
would replace, the smaller size allowing for shorter delays and a faster
clock cycle. However by 1972 Cray had become fed up working for what was now
a very big company, and left to form Cray Research. Norris remained a
staunch supporter of Cray, and even invested money into his new company.

At the same time as the 8600 effort, CDC had another project called Star
underway. Unlike the 8600's "put four 7600's in a box" solution to the speed
problem, the Star was a new design using a technique we know today as a
vector processor. Eventually the 8600 was cancelled in 1974, and the Star
would go on to become the Cyber 200. Several updates to the Cyber design
were released through the 1970's.

But by this time Cray's own designs like the Cray-1 were using the same
design techniques as the Cyber, yet doing it much faster. Meanwhile several
very large Japanese manufacturing firms were entering the market as well.
The supercomputer market was too small to be able to afford more than a
handful of players, and CDC started looking for other markets. By 1992, the
original Control Data Corporation ceased to exist as a computer hardware
manufacturer and became known as Control Data Systems, Inc., with the
non-computer business becoming Ceridian.