"A Walk Through 'Visible Storage'", section 3 of 6,
by LEN SHUSTEK
From "CORE 2.3", a publication of
The Computer History Museum.
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BUILDING SUPERCOMPUTERS
Many of the artifacts in the collection
demonstrate technological or commercial
failures, and studying these is one of the best
ways to learn from history. The
"STRETCH,"
Photo by Michael Dubinsky
IBM's attempt in the late 1950s to build a supercomputer
dramatically better than anything that had
come before, was a commercial failure
because it was too expensive and not fast
enough. But it pioneered amazing technology
that later surfaced in other computers over
the next 20 years. Due to its commercial
failure project engineer Red Dunwell was
considered a persona non grata by T.J.
Watson for many years, but later was lauded
by Watson when STRETCH's numerous
innovations had become apparent.
Although IBM was very successful in providing
computers for the military and for ordinary
businesses, from STRETCH onward, and for
the next several decades, it struggled with
building the very fastest scientific computers.
In 1965, a small company in Minnesota
introduced the
CDC 6600,
Photo by Jessica Huynh
which
tweaked IBM's nose by being the fastest
computer in the world for many years. An
angry T.J. Watson blasted his staff with this
memo: "Last week, Control Data ...announced
the 6600 system. I understand that in the
laboratory ...there are only 34 people
including the janitor. Of these, 14 are
engineers and 4 are programmers ....
Contrasting this modest effort with our vast
development activities, I fail to understand
why we have lost our industry leadership
position by letting someone else offer the
world's most powerful computer."
Sometimes, Mr. Watson, bigger isn't better.
Part of CDC's advantage over IBM was its
smallness, but part was the remarkable genius
of its principal designer, Seymour Cray. He got
his start designing computers for the military,
like this
Univac NTDS
Photo by Jessica Huynh
computer used on
board a battleship and built like a tank. In
general, the military's influence in the early
development of computers was huge and the
industry would not have developed as quickly
without it.
Seymour Cray
had a long and
distinguished career based on repeatedly
designing the world's fastest computers until
his untimely death in a car accident in 1997.
This
Cray-1
Photo by Jessica Huynh
from 1976, sometimes called the "world's most
expensive loveseat," is perhaps the most
famous example.
The physical design of fast supercomputers
presents two important problems: keeping the
circuitry close together so that delays caused
by wiring are minimized, and getting the heat
out so that circuits don't overheat. In
speaking about this machine at the time, Cray
was as proud of the plumbing that kept it cool
as the electronics that did the computing, and
would talk at length about his patents for
copper tube extrusions into the aluminum
cooling columns.
Cray's next machine, uncreatively called the
"Cray-2,"
Photo by Michael Dubinsky
solved the cooling/plumbing problem another way: the boards
themselves were swimming in a non-conducting liquid called "Fluorinert," a blood
plasma substitute used in surgery that
happens to have the right thermal,
mechanical, and electrical properties.
Changing out a defective board within the 30-minute "mean time to repair" requirement was
a challenge, though, since the Fluorinert had
to be pumped into a holding tank, the board
replaced, and the liquid pumped back.
Other people solved the cooling problem for
supercomputers in other ways. The
"ETA-10,"
Photo by Jessica Huynh
created by engineers who,
like Cray, had left CDC, contained circuit
boards that were immersed in a vat of liquid
nitrogen.
MAKING MAINFRAMES
In the meantime, IBM was doing a booming
business selling mid-sized computers for both
business and scientific purposes. But by the
early 1960s it had a looming crisis: it was
building too many different kinds of
computers. Each used different technology,
software, engineers, salesmen, and support
technicians. To consolidate behind a single
uniform product line that could do both
scientific and business computing at both small
and large scale, Watson put a 28-yearold
untested manager by the name of Fred Brooks
in charge of a "you bet your company" project
that would obsolete their entire product line.
It was a remarkably bold move for a 60-year-old prosperous company and it could have
been a colossal disaster, but the result was
wild success: IBM dominated the mainframe
computer industry for 20 years with the
System/360
Photo by Jessica Huynh
that was introduced in 1964.
Within the 360 family, IBM did finally
manage to build a supercomputer that could
compete with the CDC 6600. And this
IBM 360/91
Photo by Jessica Huynh
was perhaps the
pinnacle of the "lights and switches" front
console design, although even by then most
of the operation and fault diagnosis of
computers was being done electronically. The
end of the flashing lights and whirring tape
drives since then has made computers more
efficient but much less photogenic.
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