> On Mar 9, 2023, at 8:45 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On 3/9/23 17:33, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
>> On 3/9/23 15:51, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
>
>> Well, the IBM 709x was housed in 11 or more cabinets that were larger
>> than the largest home refrigerator. These cabinets were interconnected
>> by cables containing 100 coax cables and had one-foot square connectors
>> with 200 pins. The 7094 had 55,000 transistors on 11,000 circuit
>> cards. This was a TRULY huge computer system. The 7030 STRETCH was
>> built with similar technology, but way more of those cabinets.
>
> https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/d7fd7af8c26e659d712bf029d2287c919847e498/2-Figure2-1.png
>
> And that's not counting the stations or SBUs. 1970s.
>
> --Chuck
That picture serves to remind us of the packaging and cooling genius that went
into the CDC 6000 series machines, which could fairly be called the first
supercomputers. Logic like that and more, but in a much smaller package so it
can run faster. I suppose it didn't hurd that timing margins were shrunk down
to microscopic values (and, if you try to analyze the design, sometimes they
become negative, but somehow the machine worked anyway). They added a bunch of
amazing magic to the core memory as well.
paul
