Control Data Corporation

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Control Data Corporation, or CDC, was one of the pioneering supercomputer firms. For most of the 1960s they built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s to what was effectively a spinoff. CDC was one of the eight major computer companies through most of the 1960s; along with CDC these were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well known and highly regarded throughout the industry at one time, but today is largely forgotten.

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[edit] Background, origins: WWII–1957

During World War II the US Navy had built up a team of engineers to build codebreaking machinery for both Japanese and German mechanical ciphers. A number of these were produced by a team dedicated to the task working in the Washington, DC area. With the post-war wind-down of military spending the Navy grew increasingly worried that the team would break up and scatter into various companies, and started looking for ways to covertly keep the team together.

Eventually they found their solution; the owner of a Chase Aircraft affiliate in St. Paul, Minnesota, John Parker, was about to lose all his contracts with the end of the war. The Navy never told Parker exactly what the team did, as it would have taken too long to get top secret clearance. Parker was obviously wary, but after several meetings with increasingly high-ranking Naval officers he eventually agreed to house the team in his glider factory. The result was Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a contract engineering company that worked on a number of seemingly unrelated projects in the early 1950s.

One of these was one of the first commercial stored program computers, the 36-bit ERA 1103. The machine was built for the Navy, who intended to use it in their "above board" code-breaking centers. In the early 1950s a minor political debate broke out in Congress about the Navy essentially "owning" ERA, and the ensuing debates and legal wrangling left the company drained of both capital and spirit. In 1952 Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand.

Although Rand kept the ERA team together and developing new products, they were most interested in ERA's drum memory systems. Rand soon merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand, and in the process of merging the companies, the ERA division was folded into Sperry's UNIVAC division. At first this did not cause too many changes at ERA, as the company was used primarily as engineering talent to help support a variety of projects. However one major project was actually moved from UNIVAC to ERA, the UNIVAC II project, which led to lengthy delays and upset everyone involved.

As the Sperry "big company" mentality encroached on the decision-making power of the ERA founders, they eventually got fed up and decamped to form Control Data in 1957, setting up shop in an old warehouse down the road in Minneapolis at 501 Park Ave. Of the members forming CDC, William Norris was the unanimous choice to become CEO of the new company. Seymour Cray was likewise chosen to be the chief designer, but was still in the process of completing an early version of the 1103-based Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) and did not leave to join CDC until this was complete.

[edit] Early designs; and Cray's big plan

CDC started business by selling parts, mostly drum systems, to other companies. Cray joined the next year and immediately built a small transistor-based 6-bit machine known as "Little Character" to test his ideas on large-system design and transistor-based machines. Little Character was a success, and they soon released a 48-bit transistorized version of their 1103 redesign as the CDC 1604 in 1959, with the first machine delivered to the US Navy in 1960. The 1604 designation was chosen by adding their address (501) to Cray's former project, the 1103. A 12-bit cut-down version was also released as the CDC 160A in 1960, arguably the first minicomputer. The 160A was particularly notable as it was built into a standard office desk, a rather unusual packaging for that era. New versions of the basic 1604 architecture were re-built into the CDC 3000 series, which sold through the early and mid-1960s.

Cray immediately turned to the design of a machine that would be the fastest (or in the terminology of the day, largest) machine in the world, setting the goal at 50 times the speed of the 1604. This required radical changes in design, and as the project "dragged on" (it took about four years in total) management became increasingly upset and demanded ever-greater oversight. Cray eventually got fed up and in 1962 demanded to be set up in his own remote lab, or he would quit. Norris agreed, and after a short search the team moved to Cray's home town of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.

Not even Bill Norris the founder and President of CDC, was supposed to go there without an invitation. (See story of a salesman's uninvited visit to Chippewa Falls here.)

[edit] Peripherals business

Through the 1960s, Norris became increasingly worried that CDC had to develop "critical mass" in order to compete with IBM. In order to do this, he started an aggressive program of buying up various companies to round out CDC's peripheral lineup. In general, they tried to offer a product to compete with any of IBM's, but running 10% faster and costing 10% less. This was not always easy to achieve.

One of their first peripherals was a tape transport, which led to some internal wrangling as the Peripherals Equipment Division attempted to find a reasonable way to charge other divisions of the company for supplying the devices. If the division simply "gave" them away at cost as part of a system purchase, they would never have a real budget of their own. Instead a scheme was established in which they would share profits with the divisions selling their peripherals, a scheme eventually used throughout the company.

The tape transport was followed by the 405 Card Reader and the 415 Card Punch, followed by a series of tape drives and drum printers, all of which were designed in-house. The printer business was initially supported by Holley Carburetor in the Rochester suburb outside of Detroit. They later formalized this by creating a jointly-held company, Holley Computer Products. Holley later sold their stake back to CDC, the remains becoming the Rochester Division.

Norris was particularly interested in breaking out of the punch card-based workflow, where IBM held a stranglehold. He eventually decided to buy Rabinow Engineering, one of the pioneers of optical character recognition (OCR) systems. The idea was to bypass the entire punch card stage by having the operators simply type onto normal pages with a "known" typewriter font, then submit those pages to the computer. Since a typewritten page contains much more information than a card (which is essentially one line of a page) this would offer savings all around. Unfortunately this seemingly simple task turned out to be much harder than anyone expected, and while CDC became a major player in the early days of OCR systems, it has remained a niche product to this day. Rabinow's Rockville plant was eventually closed in 1976, and CDC eventually left the business.

With the continued delays on the OCR project, it became clear that punch cards were not going to go away any time soon, and CDC had to address this as quickly as possible. Although the 405 remained in production, it was an expensive machine to build. So another purchase was Bridge Engineering, who offered a line of lower cost as well as higher speed card punches. All card handling products were moved to what became the Valley Forge Division after Bridge moved to a new factory, with the tape transports to follow. Eventually the Valley Forge and Rochester divisions were spun-off to form a new joint company with National Cash Register, Computer Peripherals Inc (CPI), in order to share development and production costs across the two companies. ICL later joined the effort. Eventually the Rochester Division was sold to Centronics in 1982.

Another side-effect of Norris' attempts to diversify was the creation of a number of service bureaus that ran jobs on behalf of smaller companies that could not afford to buy a computer. This was never very profitable, and in 1965 several managers suggested the unprofitable centers be closed in a cost-cutting measure. Nevertheless Norris was so convinced of the idea he refused to accept this, and ordered an across-the-board "belt tightening" instead.

[edit] The CDC 6600: defining supercomputing

Meanwhile at the new Chippewa lab, Seymour Cray, Jim Thornton and Dean Roush put together a team of 34 engineers (themselves included), and continued work on the new design. In 1964 this was released as the CDC 6600, outperforming everything on the market by roughly ten times. The 6600 had a CPU with multiple asynchronous functional units, and used 10 logical, external I/O processors to offload many common tasks. That way the CPU could devote all of its time and circuitry to processing data while the other controllers dealt with mundane tasks like punching cards and running disks. Using late-model compilers the machine attained 0.5 MFlops, while handcrafted assembly delivered about 1.0 MFLOPS. A slower version was released as the CDC 6400; a two processor version of the 6400 was called the 6500. Cray turned to an even faster machine built along different lines, then known as the 6800.

It was after the delivery of the 6600 that IBM took notice of the new company. At the time Thomas J. Watson, Jr. asked (paraphrased) How is it that this tiny company of 34 people—including the janitor—can be beating us when we have thousands of people?, to which Cray quipped You just answered your own question. In 1965 IBM started an effort to build their own machine that would be even faster than the 6600, the ACS. Two hundred people were assembled on the west coast to work on the project away from corporate prodding, in an attempt to mirror Cray's offsite lab. The project produced interesting architecture and technology, but was not compatible with IBM's very successful System/360 line. It was redirected to be System/360-compatible, but this compromised performance, and ACS was eventually cancelled in 1969 after producing no product.

In the short term IBM also went ahead and announced a new version of the famed System/360 that would be just as fast as the 6600, the Model 92. This machine didn't exist, but that didn't stop sales of the 6600 from drying up while people waited for its release (a tactic known today as FUD). Norris didn't take this lying down, and a year later filed an antitrust suit against IBM, eventually winning over 600 million dollars and picking up the Service Bureau Corporation, an IBM subsidiary that ran computer processing for other corporations on SBC's computers.

During the design of the 6600, CDC had set up Project SPIN to supply the system with a high speed hard disk system. At the time it was unclear if disks would replace memory drums, which were faster, nor was it clear if fixed or removable disks would be the most popular. Thus SPIN explored all of these approaches, and eventually delivered a very large 28" fixed disk of extremely high performance, as well as a smaller multi-platter 14" removable disk pack system as well. Over time, the disk business pioneered in SPIN would turn into a major product line.

[edit] The CDC 7600 and 8600

The same month they won their lawsuit against IBM they also announced their new machine, the CDC 7600 (originally the 6800). Cray had started the design even before the 6600 was shipping, and allowed it to mature fully. This machine's clock was almost four times the speed of the 6600, and offered about four times the total throughput. Much of this speed increase was due to extensive use of pipelining, a technique that allows different parts of the CPU to work on different aspects of the instruction process at the same time. The time to run any particular instruction is no faster, but the program as a whole moves through the system more quickly as the instructions are queued up. Sadly the complexity also led to poor reliability, and while the 7600 project certainly paid for itself, it did serious damage to CDC's reputation.

Cray then turned to the latest in the series, the CDC 8600. The 8600 was essentially four 7600's in a single, much smaller, case. The smaller size and shorter signal paths allowed the 8600 to run at much higher clock speeds, which was combined with higher speed memory for most of the performance gains. Unfortunately the 8600 was "old school" in terms of physical construction, using individual components soldered to circuit boards. There were so many solder joints on the 8600 that the machines never worked reliably. With even one bad joint the machine would be "flaky". Cray decided that a re-design was needed.

[edit] The STAR and the Cyber

In addition to the redesign of the 8600, CDC had another project called STAR underway, led by Cray's former collaborator on the 6600/7600, Jim Thornton. Unlike the 8600's "put four 7600s in a box" solution to the speed problem, the STAR was a new design using a technique we know today as a vector processor. By highly pipelining math instructions with purpose-built instructions and hardware, math processing is dramatically improved in a machine that was otherwise slower than a 7600. Although the particular set of problems it would be best at was limited in comparison to the "generalist" 7600, it was exactly these sorts of problems that customers bought CDC machines to solve. The vector length was 65,536 64-bit words.

The two projects competed for limited funds in the late 1960s, and Norris felt that the company could not support development of the STAR and a complete redesign of the 8600 at the same time. He told Cray, who in 1972 left to form Cray Research. Norris remained a staunch supporter of Cray, and even invested money into his new company. Eventually the 8600 was cancelled in 1974, and the STAR released the same year. The STAR, also designated as the Cyber 203, proved to have considerably worse "real world" performance than expected. Jim Thornton left CDC to form Network Systems Corporation.

A variety of systems based on the basic 6600/7600 architecture were repackaged at different price/performance points as the CDC Cyber, and became CDC's main product line in the 1970s. This included an updated version of the STAR architecture, the Cyber 205, which had considerably better performance than the original. But by this time Cray's own designs like the Cray-1 were using the same design techniques as the STAR, yet doing it much faster due to various design details. Sales of the STAR were weak, but Control Data produced a successor system, the Cyber 200/205, which gave Cray Research limited competition.

CDC also embarked on a number of special projects for its client base which produced an even smaller number of black projects. The CDC Advanced Flexible Processor (AFP), also known as CYBER PLUS, was one such machine with only one or two known examples made.

[edit] ETA Systems, hard disks, oblivion

CDC decided to fight back, but Norris agreed with Cray in thinking that the company had become moribund and unable to quickly design anything competitive. Instead he set up a new spinoff company in 1983, ETA Systems, with the design goal being a machine processing at 10 GFLOPs, about 40 times the speed of the Cray-1. The ETA design never fully matured and was unable to hit its design goals, but nevertheless it was one of the fastest computers on the market and a handful were sold over the next few years. Eventually the effort ended after half hearted attempts at selling ETA. In 1989 most of the employees were laid off and the remains of the company folded into CDC.

Meanwhile several very large Japanese manufacturing firms were entering the market as well. The supercomputer market was too small to be able to afford more than a handful of players, so CDC started looking for other markets. One of these was the high-performance hard disk market, which was becoming more interesting as personal computers started to include them in the mid-1980s. By then, CDC through its Magnetic Peripherals unit, originally a joint venture with Honeywell, was a major player in the hard drive market—their Wren series drives were particularly popular for "high end" users. They also codeveloped the now universal ATA interface with Compaq and Western Digital to lower the cost of adding low-performance drives.

Oddly, then, CDC decided to exit the hard drive business entirely in 1988, spinning off Magnetic Peripherals under the name Imprimis; the next year, Imprimis was purchased by Seagate Technology, who had been seriously lagging in the high-end drive market. The remains of CDC became known as Control Data Systems, Inc., now Syntegra (USA), a subsidiary of the BT Group's BT Global Services; CDC's non-computer business became the Ceridian Corporation.

[edit] References

    • A Few Good Men from Univac, David Lundstrom, MIT Press, 1987.
    • The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer, Charles Murray, John Wiley, 1997
    • The Eye for Innovation: Recognizing Possibilities and Managing the Creative Enterprise, Robert M. Price, Yale University Press, 2005

    [edit] External links

    • Control Data Corporation Records (CBI 80) – At the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; CDC archives collection donated by Ceridian Corporation in 1991 (pages also contain historical timeline, product timeline, acquisitions list, joint ventures list)

    [edit] Film and Science Fiction references

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