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IT HISTORY
How Seymour Cray’s CDC 6600 Outran IBM
A 34-person lab solved the hardware problem; delivering a usable system took much more work
Watson’s memo
On August 28, 1963, IBM chairman and chief executive Thomas J. Watson Jr. signed an internal memo.
CDC had just announced the 6600. By Watson’s account, the development laboratory had only 34 people, including a janitor: 14 engineers and four programmers. Given the scale of IBM’s research effort, he couldn't understand how CDC had announced what he called the world’s most powerful computer first. He wanted to know where IBM had gone wrong, and what it should change at once, at the top of the agenda for the Jenny Lake meeting.
IBM had recently suffered its own setback. Two years earlier, its 7030 supercomputer, known as Stretch, had fallen short of its performance target. IBM had set out to make it at least 100 times faster than the earlier 704. By 1961, measurements put it at roughly 30 to 40 times the 704’s speed.
In May 1961, IBM ended future sales of Stretch. According to IBM’s history of the machine, its price fell from $13.5 million to about $7.8 million, below cost. Only nine systems went into service.
