Category Archives: 1964

CDC 6600

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cdc6600The CDC 6600 by Control Data Corporation is believed to have been the first computer to be designated as a supercomputer, offering the fastest clock speed for its day (100 nanoseconds). It was one of the first computers to use Freon refrigerant cooling and as also the first commercial computer to use a CRT console. (CDC checkout engineers created computer games such as Baseball, Lunar Lander, and Space War, which became incentives for getting the machines operational. These are thought to be the first computer games that used monitors.)

The CDC 6600 was a large-scale, solid-state, general-purpose computing system. It had a distributed architecture (central scientific processor supported by ten very fast peripheral machines) and was a reduced instruction set (RISC) machine many years before such a term was invented. Input to the computer was by punch cards or seven-channel digital magnetic tape. Output was available from two line printers, a card punch, a photographic plotter, and standard magnetic tape. An interactive display console allowed users to view graphical results as data were being processed.

The CDC 6600 had 65,000 60-bit words of memory. It was equipped with a large disk storage device and six high-speed drums as storage intermediate in speed and accessibility between the central core storage and magnetic tapes. The 6600 supported the FORTRAN 66 compiler and a program library.

SABRE

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sabre1In the late 1950s, IBM teamed with American Airlines to devise a teleprocessing solution — SABRE. When fully implemented, SABRE established a dominant design for reservations processing that was copied throughout the airline industry. Functional enhancements transformed SABRE from a reservations system into a passenger services system that supported many additional aspects of airline operations. This led to being co-opted by other airlines, and it became the de-facto reservation system in the U.S. for decades.

Widespread access to SABRE for travel agents coincided with regulatory reform that was redefining competition in the industry. SABRE was later transformed again into a sales distribution system. American Airlines’ management exploited SABRE’s latent economies of scale and scope to survive, and ultimately thrive, in a deregulated environment.

BASIC

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basicBASIC (Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a system developed at Dartmouth College in 1964 under the directory of J. Kemeny and T. Kurtz. It was implemented for the G.E.225. It was meant to be a very simple language to learn and also one that would be easy to translate. Furthermore, the designers wished it to be a stepping-stone for students to learn on of the more powerful languages such as FORTRAN or ALGOL.