CDC 6600 (Serial number 1)

1964

Control Data Corporation, United States

When introduced in 1964, the CDC 6600 was the fastest machine in the world. Designed by Seymour Cray, the 6600 executed about three million instructions per second and remained the fastest machine for five years, until Cray produced his next supercomputer, the 7600.

The elegant architecture of the 6600 included one 60-bit central processor with multiple functional units that executed in parallel with ten shared-logic 12-bit peripheral I/O processors. The machine was Freon cooled. Selling for $6 to $10 million each, Control Data Corporation (CDC) manufactured about 100 machines.

Memory Type: Core Speed: 10 MFLOPS

Memory Size: 64K+2M Cost: $10,000,000

Memory Width: (60-bit)