Orthographic 2-view drawing of CDC 6600 with scaling 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 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation.[8][9] Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three.[10][11] With performance of up to three megaFLOPS,[12][13] the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.[14]
^"The 7600 design lasted longer than any other supercomputer design. It had the highest performance of any computer from its introduction in 1969 till the introduction of the Cray 1 in 1976." "CDC 7600". Archived from the original on 2016-05-15. Retrieved 2017-10-15.
^N. Lewis, "Purchasing Power: Rivalry, Dissent, and Computing Strategy in Supercomputer Selection at Los Alamos," in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 39 no. 3 (2017): 25-40, 2017 [1]