CDC 6600

CDC 6600
CDC 6600
	3D rendering with a figure as scale
Design
Manufacturer	Control Data Corporation
Designer	Seymour Cray
Release date	September 1964
Units sold	100+
Price	US$2,370,000 (equivalent to $24,600,000 in 2025)
Casing
Dimensions	Height : 2,000 mm (79 in); Cabinet width: 810 mm (32 in); Cabinet length : 1,710 mm (67 in); Width overall : 4,190 mm (165 in)
Weight	about 12,000 lb (6.0 short tons; 5.4 t)
Power	30 kW @ 208 V 400 Hz
System
Operating system	SCOPE, KRONOS
CPU	60-bit processor @ 10 MHz
Memory	Up to 982 kilobytes (131000 x 60 bits)
MIPS	2 MIPS
Predecessor	CDC 1604
Successor	CDC 7600

The CDC 6600. Behind the system console are two of the "arms" of the plus-sign shaped cabinet with the covers opened. Individual modules can be seen inside. The racks holding the modules are hinged to give access to the racks behind them. Each arm of the machine had up to four such racks. On the right is the cooling system.

A CDC 6600 system console. This design was a major innovation, in that the screens and keyboard replaced hundreds of switches and blinking lights common in contemporary system consoles. The displays were driven through software, primarily to provide text display in a choice of three sizes. It also provided a way to draw simple graphics. Unlike more modern displays, the console was a vector drawing system, rather than a raster system. The consoles had a single font, where each glyph was a series of vectors. Autocompletion of keyword parts enabled quicker command entry.

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.