CDC 6000 series

The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s.Each is a large, solid-state, general-purpose, digital computer that performs scientific and business data processing as well as multiprogramming, multiprocessing, Remote Job Entry, time-sharing, and data management tasks under the control of the operating system called SCOPE (Supervisory Control Of Program Execution).The family's members differ primarily by the number and kind of central processor(s):[17] Certain features and nomenclature had also been used in the earlier CDC 3000 series: The only currently (as of 2018) running CDC 6000 series machine, a 6500, has been restored by Living Computers: Museum + Labs[21] It was built in 1967 and used by Purdue University until 1989 when it was decommissioned and then given to the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology before being purchased by Paul Allen for LCM+L.It was introduced in September 1964 and performs up to three million instructions per second, three times faster than the IBM Stretch, the speed champion for the previous couple of years.Then followed a machine with dual 6400-style central processors, the CDC 6500, designed principally by James E. Thornton, in October 1967.The highly efficient address and data control mechanisms involved permit a word to be moved into or out of central memory in as little as 100 nanoseconds.It performs the addition, subtraction, and logical operations and all of the multiplication, division, incrementing, indexing, and branching instructions for user programs.Due to the serial nature of the 6400 CPU, its exact speed is heavily dependent on instruction mix, but generally around 1 MIPS.Only the PPs have access to the channels and can perform input/output: the transfer of information between central memory and peripheral devices such as disks and magnetic tape units.Much of the operating system ran on the PPs,[28] thus leaving the full power of the Central Processor available for user programs.Special instructions perform data transfer between processor memory and, via the channels, peripheral devices at up to 1 μs per word.One of the peripheral processors runs a dedicated program called "DSD" (Dynamic System Display), which drives the console.The console also includes a keyboard through which the operator can enter requests to modify stored programs and display information about jobs in or awaiting execution.(Unfortunately, it took CDC another 15 years to offer FSE, a full-screen editor for normal time-sharing users on CDCs Network Operating System.)The CDC 6600 is the flagship mainframe supercomputer of the 6000 series of computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation.[35][26] The CDC 6600 anticipated the RISC design philosophy and, unusually, employed a ones'-complement representation of integers.The first CDC 6600s were delivered in 1965 to the Livermore and Los Alamos National Labs (managed by the University of California).In 1966 another CDC 6600 was delivered to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, part of the University of California at Berkeley, where it was used for the analysis of nuclear events photographed inside the Alvarez bubble chamber.[38] The University of Texas at Austin had one delivered for its Computer Science and Mathematics Departments, and installed underground on its main campus, tucked into a hillside with one side exposed, for cooling efficiency.[39][40][41][42][43][44] In 1966, the Computing Center (German: Rechenzentrum) of the RWTH Aachen University acquired a CDC 6400, the first Control Data supercomputer in Germany and the second one in Europe after the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).It served the entire university also by 64 remote-line teletypes (TTY) until it was replaced by a CDC Cyber 175 computer in 1976.