CDC 6600

Ever wonder what the state of the art in Computer Science was back in 1964? Me neither, but Jack sent me a link. I glanced at it, but geez, if they aren't exactly dinosaurs, they are more like American cars from the same era, big, expensive and flashy. Then Jay notices that there is a Control Data 6600 in the list, which brings back some memories

We had a CDC 6600 at the University of Texas when I was there (1978-80). It was installed in a room under the patio in back of the (infamous) tower. There was a hallway alongside the room separated by glass. It was slightly elevated so you could walk by and gaze down upon the great and terrible Oz. It was some kind of yellowish color. Burnt ochre? Almond?

When I started my Computer Science classes there our jobs were limited to like 7 seconds to compile and run. When I got to upper division classes the reigns were loosened a bit. I wrote a program to process a small image (like 50 gray scale pixels square) and I didn't really plan it out very well, I just sort of hacked it together. It seemed like a trivial problem. It ran, but it used something like a couple of minutes of time which almost consumed the entire class's allotment for the semester. I got dinged for being inefficient.

Some time later I came across some old CDC controller cabinets for sale. They were pretty cool, about four feet high, they had a pair of cast aluminum doors on the front with a series of dark green glass windows. I would still like to get my hands on one. They were right out of a science fiction movie.

Another thing that was cool was that the operators console had a little bar in the bottom left corner of the screen for status messages. It would had some kind of swirly/barber pole thing going on. This was in the days when all you normally got on the screen was text.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.
Update November 2017 replaced dead link