The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.foklore.computers as well.
[email protected] (Patrick O'Keefe) writes: > I don't know what the "C" was for, but CDC definitely made > computers in the 1960s. There was a least a "6000 series". > The University of Washington had a CDC 6400 in the late '60s > as I recall. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#9 Assembler Question http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#12 Assembler Question control data corporation ... there is folklore in the late 60s, about the cdc 6600 at berkeley having a thermal problem a little after 10am tuesday mornings (???) and shutting down. After this happened some number of times ... they basically isolated it to low water pressure to the datacenter cooling system. Eventually identified: 1) tuesday(?) morning was when the grass was being watered and 2) 10am(?) was class break ... with lots of students heading to rest rooms & flushing. The combination was enough to drop water pressue to datacenter cooling. recent posts in related thread about liqued cooling: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#46 Z11 - Water cooling? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#77 Z11 - Water cooling? note ... one of the litigation settlements was SBC (service bureau corporation) going to CDC (there was also some number of employees that filed legal actions about their change employments) ... also mentioned in CDC wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Data_Corporation from above: In the meantime, IBM announced a new version of the famed System/360, the Model 92, which would be just as fast as CDC's 6600. This machine did not exist, but its nonexistence did not stop sales of the 6600 from drying up, while people waited for the release of the Model 92. Norris did not take this tactic, dubbed as fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), lying down, and in an antitrust suit against IBM a year later, he won over 600 million dollars. He also picked up IBM's subsidiary Service Bureau Corporation (SBC), which ran computer processing for other corporations on its own computers. SBC fit nicely into CDC's existing service bureau offerings. ... snip ... during the morph from cp67 to vm370 ... there was first the transition where the cp67 group split off from the science center ... and took over the boston programming center on the 3rd flr of 545 tech sq http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech as the group outgrew the 3rd flr ... they moved out to the (vacant) SBC bldg. in burlington mall. They were there until a little after future system project being killed http://www.garilc.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys during the Future System phase ... lots of 370 product activity was neglected (since FS was targeted as complelely replacing 370 ... in much the same way that 360 had obsoleted previous computer generations). With the death of FS ... there was a mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product lines ... including a crash program for 370-xa. POK made the business case that in order to make the mvs/xa product schedule ... they needed all the people in the vm370 group ... shutdown burlington mall location, move all the people to POK (and kill off the vm370 product). Endicott eventually made the case to pick up the vm370 product mission (but had to reconstitute a group from scratch). for additional product drift ... the pre-occupation with Future System ... and neglecting 370 products ... contributed to clone processors in getting market foothold ... slightly interesting, since Future System was largely motivated as a countermeasure to clone controllers. -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
