CDC 6600
computer
The CDC 6600 is the flagship of the discontinued 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three. With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.
The first CDC 6600s were delivered in 1965 to Livermore and Los Alamos. They quickly became a must-have system in high-end scientific and mathematical computing, with systems being delivered to Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, CERN, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and many others. At least 100 were delivered in total.
A CDC 6600 is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
History and impact
CDC's first products were based on the machines designed at Engineering Research Associates (ERA), which Seymour Cray had been asked to update after moving to CDC. After an experimental machine known as the Little Character, in 1960 they delivered the CDC 1604, one of the first commercial transistor-based computers, and one of the fastest machines on the market. Management was delighted, and made plans for a new series of machines that were more tailored to business use; they would include instructions for character handling and record keeping for instance. Cray was not interested in such a project and set himself the goal of producing a new machine that would be 50 times faster than the 1604.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q683851. The Library of Congress control number is sh85021579. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1969, 1965 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “CDC 6600” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.