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Cray-1, the First Commercial Vector Supercomputer (1970s)
Seymour Cray led the design of the Control Data Corporation CDC 6600, which was announced in 1964, sold for around $7 million and was the first successful supercomputer. Some of its features were |
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- having the fastest clock speed for its day (100 nanoseconds),
- the first commercial computer to use a CRT console,
- having 65,000 60-bit words of memory, and
- having the Fortran 66 compiler and a program library.
| After developing CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, which had been huge successes in the end, Cray later left CDC to form Cray Research, Inc. In 1976, he announced the Cray-1. This machine was simultaneously the fastest in the world, the most expensive, and the computer with the best cost/performance for scientific programs. Some of its features were |
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- costing $8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks),
- weighing 5-1/2 tons,
- having a 12.5-nanosecond clock, 64 vector registers,
- having 1 million 64-bit words of high-speed memory, and
- able to execute over 80 megaflops.