2 of 3 Control Data HQ Towers c. 1985

Mall of America (left) & 3 Control Data HQ towers at 8100 34h Ave S (2016-01-03)

CIM/ICEM Inc. SW dev (a.k.a. the Swamp, a.k.a. Arden Woods) and
CDC computer manufacturing plant in Arden Hills aerial view (2016-01-05)

Cyber175 NOS 2.9.7 simulator

Shapr3D based in Budapest: History of Computer-Aided Design: Miscellaneous Companies
This page has pretty good description of CDC and ICEM/DDN but a few implications aren't quite on the mark. I believe Joe Dudziak was the founding manager of the manufacturing technology group which became CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing). Initially, it was 2 guys, then 6 to port the software to run on CDC systems. After a few years, CDC bought the rights for further development and bug correction from Hanratty; his folks weren't able to keep up with our customers' demands, and their planned feature additions, so we rapidly staffed up to do it ourselves, hiring new grads, bringing in people like me from other parts of CDC. And then we also ported to other systems. But we still fell behind on minor bugs & design annoyances of a couple customers.

We'd been running on the Data General minis for several years by 1986 and had a sub-group on Sorrento Valley (Road or Blvd?) in San Diego (not far from Hughes Telecomm & Paul Jacobs's later Qualcomm) testing, bug-fixing and updating that line. In 1986 we were running ICEM/DDN on a number of other systems: 60-bit NOS and 64-bit NOS/VE of course, AT&T UNIX, SunOS then Solaris (at least by some time in late 1987 or early 1987), and SGI to see which worked best. People in the CDC Professional Services field offices in the USA and Europe were even developing features. "Critical bug" displays went up in the hall-ways. Customers sent in, or we went out to collect "10 most important" bug and desired feature lists.

Then again, we had a 40% management & worker-bee RIF in about 1986 October. Daily integration builds, daily full-test-set SQA runs, daily meetings on priorities, divvying up work, & release progress were held. Between 1984 and 1987 there were a lot of 60-hour work-weeks, a few 30-hour work-days just trying to get things done for the next release, but a few parties, a few 80-90 minute lunches at Lake Josephine or group lunch at Que Viet or checking out the Thai place at Energy Park near ETA.

CIM/ICEM Inc. SW dev (a.k.a. the Swamp, a.k.a. Arden Woods) and
CDC computer manufacturing plant in Arden Hills aerial map view (2016-01-03)

2002
David A. Steinman, Monathan B. Thomas, Hanif M. Ladak, Jaques S. Milner, Brian K. Rutt & J. David Spence _Magnetic Resonance in Medicine_/Wiley-Liss vol47: pp149-159 Reconstruction of Carotid Bifurcation Hemodynamics and Wall Thickness Using Computational Fluid Dynamics and MRI

2007-04-19
A.D. Augst, B. Ariff, S.A.G. McG. Thom, X.Y. Xu, & A.D. Hughes _American Journal of Physiology: Heart & Circulatory Physiology_ vol293 0363-6135/07 ppH1031-H1037
Analysis of complex flow and the relationship between blood pressure, wall
shear stress, and intima-media thickness in the human carotid artery
"The re-constructed surface splines [from MRI and [MATLAB (MathWorks, Natick, MA) to produce the input file for the grid generator (ICEM Hexa) (ICEM CFD, ANSYS, Canonsburg, PA] of the carotid artery were used with a commercial CAD/CAE package (ICEM-DDN)..."
CCA = common carotid artery and carotid bulb
CFD = computational fluid dynamics
DBP = diastolic blood pressure
ECA = external carotid artery
ICA = internal carotid artery
IMT = intima-media thickness
MRI = NMR = nuclear magnetic resonance imaging
OSI = oscillatory shear index
PP = pulse pressure
SBP = brachial systolic blood pressure
WSSAG = wall shear stress angle gradients
WSSav = average wall shear stress

"The Thief Who Came to Dinner" (1973; Bud Yorkin, Walter Hill, Terrence Lore Smith, Ryan O'Neal; HQ tower & parking lot with many Ford Mustangs; sure, the cars were a movie sponsor placement, but more or less reality at the time.)

"Die Hard" (1988; John McTiernan, Roderick Thorp, Bruce Willis, Reginald VelJohnson; they murdered my computers!)

"They Live" (1988; John Carpenter, Roddy Piper; CDC bill-boards with "hidden alien messages")

Comprehensive Assembly language - COMPASS
CPU & PPU insructions
pseudo-instructions

CIM division: Joe Dudziak retirement picnic
the cake
candid close examination of the cake
Joe D
Mitch "mad scientist" skit
VP introduces guest of honor
candid zoom on rapt listeners
candid lining up for food
candid cake and conversation
candid milling about 127
candid milling about 128
candid milling about 129
candid milling about 130
candid milling about 131
candid milling about 132
candid milling about 134
candid milling about 138
candid milling about 139
If you see yourself or have names, drop me a line.

party
Rhonda the receptionist/sys admin and Rod
Amy the office jazz expert

Cyber 930 from the roll-out brochure
signatures of some of those involved in development of the 930

Control Data Corporation histories, etc.

Electronic Literature knowledge base

Thornton's book as pdf
James E. Thornton: _Design of a Computer: the CDC 6600_
They already had Extended Core Storage (ECS) in the 6600, not a decade or more later in the Cyber 7x series as I had been led to believe. And they (Thornton & Cray) had already coined the term "sword" (super-word) which back then was 480 bits... with 8 bits of parity so you could do single error correction, double error detection (SECDED). (This pdf appears to be an image scan, not searchable.)
DBLP: computer science bibliography: books and articles by James E. Thornton
Considerations in Computer Design Leading Up to the Control Data 600
1963: James E. Thornton: Considerations in Computer Design Leading Up to the Control Data 6600
James E. Thornton: parallel operation in the Control Data 6600 (from the Computer History Museum at the U of Waterloo, Canada)

Seymour Roger Cray (s of Seymour Ruesink Cray ii 1900-1996 & Lilliam G. Scholer 1898-1992) b: 1925-09-28 at Chippewa Falls, Chippewa county WI d: 1996-10-05 at Colorado Springs, El Paso county Co buried: Forest Hill cem., Chippewa Falls, Chippewa county WI IEEE Computer Society: Seymour Roger Clay b: 1925-09-28 d: 1996-10-05
(FindAGrave)
(Interesting Engineering)
(HPE)
(NSA)
(Authentic Wisconsin)
2013: John L. Jerz: the first super-computer (CDC 6600)

Gordon Bell (I hereby forgive him for turning to the dark side in 1995; if "publish or perish" were true, he could "live" for many more decades.) Cybers could also run Ascent+Asper & later COMPASS assemblers, BASIC, evil Cobol, LISP, SNOBOL, Pascal (the ETH Zurich Pascal compiler was a little flakey on I/O); there were function packages for vector and matrix math, apps for statistics (e.g. SPSS, SAS), proto-data-base tools like MARS & SIR, another package that came out of North Carolina's Research Triangle's Blue Ridge Information Systems, and, in the early 1980s, relational data-bases using RIM (from SUNY Buffalo+IBM+Boeing I believe). SPICE the electronics design package, NASTRAN & GTNASTRAN, GTStruDL, ICEM/DDN & other packages for design and engineering analysis. And, of course, the PLAyTOy Computer Based Education/video-gaming sub-system could serve up to 1K students/users/players at a time.
Clemson: people in computing

Control Data Corporation was founded 1957-07-08 (ACM digital library; pay-walled pdf)
Control Data Corporation (wikipedia)
Control Data Corporation (map of locations explicitly mentioned in above article)
Control Data Corporation time-line sketch (U of Minnesota)
sens agent history

Y Combinator discussion about why the CDC 6600 was fast Cybers could use either a double-null terminated string or a blank-space terminated string, and Greg R. Mansfield wrote the "magic" to quickly convert without having to laboriously create a mask by shifting 6 bits at a time. He did it by leveraging a peculiarity of multiplication and 1s complement to create the mask in one operation... well, one main operation and some glue. If you were using the usual double-null terminator, and there were 9 significant characters in a word, then you had to have 11 null bytes -- the last 6 bits of one word and all 60 bits of the next. Pascal's limit on strings was 255 characters, plus the first one to hold the length of the string. The 6/12 character set was deployed in the late 1970s, requiring 2 characters to be used as "escape" characters to tell it that it & the character following meant something else from usual. It wasn't until the 800 series that Cybers had full ASCII on systems running NOS/VE.

I liken the PPUs (and later I/O units) to DMAs. They had direct access to main memory, and to peripherals: terminals, disk, tape, speakers, whatever. Some docs suggested that early machines actually had only 1 PPU, then 2, but they time-shared operation to appear to be 8 or 16 PPUs. The CPU had access to main memory, by storing special values in a special address, CPU monitor took it as a request, and then signaled when it was complete. How do you get the date-time? You store the request date-time, lose control, and when you get control back, there is the date & time in main memory, in your jobs memory-space, down to the millisecond during that era. I guess that's just a different wording of what "vajrabum wrote on 2020-02-17.

There were systems rigged with sensors that connected to the PPUs as part of simulations. You'd get into the simulator and work controls you were familiar with, and it would be fed in, and the simulator program would send out signals that caused things in the simulator to change positions via actuators, indicator lights, message display, etc. Yes, there was a set of toggle switches which constituted the dead-start boot program for PPU0, enough so that it could read/load the rest. At first, you had to load punched cards, then it shifted to having to load one or more magnetic tapes, but then they (Don Linton/DFL pronounced Diffle) developed dead-start from disk to make it faster.

Yes, the console had a specific channel dedicated to it to give essential real-time info.

Early on PLAyTOy required a dedicated system. But not knowing it was impossible, some guys made it work while Kronos was tending to other time-sharing users... PLAyTOy was just another set of jobs.

Yes, Cybers were used for time-sharing. Bob Tate designed most of that part of Kronos.

The PPUs ran PPU monitor and CPU monitor, and did I/O, and date-time-stamps. They did not contain "the operating system", but certainly some important parts. Much of the operating system ran on the CPU.

When the 6600 first came out, reports were that it tested out as twice as fast as the fastest box sold by those B-school bozo guys, and the price was half... so, yes, it really truly was a super-computer.

"jhayward" on 2020-03-15 wrote that UTA ran their operating system for Cybers, UT-2D. Purdue had MACE by Greg Mansfield & Dave Cahlander.

David Walker: Microscopy UK: a macro exploration of a 1960s super-computer ferrite memory core and processor module in the CDC 6600 designed by Semour R. Cray & James E. Thornton

Mark ??: College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences: School of Computer Science: CDC 6600

B.B. Clayton, E.K. Dorff & R.E. Fagen: AFIPS proceedings 1964 October: an operating systerm and programmign systems for the 6600 PDF released with SIPROS operating system; later came SCOPE, Kronos, NOS, NOS/VE. Article discusses initial job processing management, priority juggling, disk storage, what the operator's console displays, etc.

Museum at Waalsdorp, Netherlands: 1983-1986: Control Data Cyber 170-835
Museum at Waalsdorp, Netherlands: 1983-1986: Control Data Cyber 170-835 at Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (TNO; Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research)

Cyber 170/180/800 series general description transition from 60-bit words to 64-bit words, to byte-addressability, from 1's complement to [accursed] 2's complement (with loss of the valuable -0 "missing data" indicator), "virtual memory", caches, recursion stacks, microcode, addition of trap interrupts to exchange interrupts, MLS (multi-level security) & code vs. data segregation, code-sharing between processes, improved source code library/ version control/ configuration management tools, ability to continue running 60-bit NOS, VE/UX Unix, TCE (Transparent Computing Environment) for drag-and-drop between windows ease-of-use among Cybers, Macintosh, Windoze, Vax/VMS, DataGeneral AOS/VS, flavors of Unix (Irix, SCO Unix, AT&T Unix, Linux), word-processing, text-editing, page lay-out, spread-sheet applications...

U of Minnesota: Engineering Research Associates (ERA)
U of Minnesota: Control Data Corporation (CDC)

Cyber1

John Daleske Space: history of computing: PLAyTOy system -- games
John Daleske Space: Empire V
Moby Games: Conquest
UVList.net: Empier 1, a.k.a. PLAyTOy Empire
Computer Role-Playing Games book project
IRATA.online: for retro-computing enthusiasts
2016-10-29: Richard Moss: ars technica: Want to see gaming's past and future? Dive into the "educational" world of PLAyTOy: an educational systerm helped pioneer sports games, in-game chats, and simultaneous play
Data Driven Gamer
Illinois Distributed Museum: PLAyTOy impacts
U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Grainger College of Engineering: PLAyTOy
2010-08-01: Kirk L. Kroeker: Communications of the ACM: celebrating the legacy of PLAyTOy plasma touch-screens since 1972
PLAyTOy History (Ray Ozzie! Turn back away from the dark side!)

U of Minnesota: Engineering Research Associates (ERA)
U of Minnesota: Control Data Corporation (CDC)

Cyber1

John Daleske Space: history of computing: PLAyTOy system -- games
John Daleske Space: Empire V
Moby Games: Conquest
UVList.net: Empier 1, a.k.a. PLAyTOy Empire
Computer Role-Playing Games book project
Data Driven Gamer
Illinois Distributed Museum: PLAyTOy impacts
U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC): Grainger College of Engineering: PLAyTOy
2010-08-01: Kirk L. Kroeker: Communications of the ACM: celebrating the legacy of PLAyTOy plasma touch-screens since 1972
PLAyTOy History (Ray Ozzie! Turn back away from the dark side!)

1985-07-03: Michael Abramowitz: LATimes: Commercial Credit Corp moves to re-structure; lost $21M it had contributed to Ohio private insurance fund for thrifts
Commercial Credit Corp was subsequently merged into Travelers [insurance] Group, then into CitiCorp.
1989-06-13: John Markof: NYTimes: Control Data Corp to sell disk drive subsidiary Imprimis Technology, formerly Magnetic Peripherals, to Seagate; once was part of a joint venture with Seagate that developed the Wren 10MB drive for micro-computers about 1985
1992-05-28: Lawrence M. Fisher: NYTimes: Control Data Corp to split into Ceridian (including Arbitron ratings, pay-roll & HR records processing, sys admin & network management) and Control Data Systems Inc. (to be headed by James E. Ousley to continue manufacturing computer hardware); has not turned a profit since 1988 and has sold, spun out, or closed some 20 subsidiaries
2016-08-08/ 2018-05-23/ 2018-06-11: Jonathan Martin: OxfordU/Cengage Encyclopedia: incorporated 1957 as Control Data Corporation with capital of $600K: article claims there were still 18K employees, sales of $2.83G; founded 1945 as Engineering Research Associates (ERA); 1500 employees in 1952 with 80% of USA installed computer systems; 1961 started making peripheral...; peak employment about 65K
1995 March: John Pound: Hahvahd Bidness Review: executive management, board governance of corporations, and bad decisions

paste bin
PLAyTOy
Game Tech Wiki: PLAyTOy
Tutor Programming Language/PLAyTOy Author Language
Empire/Conquest (PLAyTOy video-games)
FSU PLAyTOy FSU was one of the first, c.1974, to allow use of the general-purpose operating system (Kronos, NOS) at the same time there were PLAyTOy users.
Control Data Corporation (like2do)
(OK, but the Cyber 910 was CDC's micro-computer, rolled out around 1980. The Cyber 930 mini-computer was manufactured in Canada and announced in 1986.)

Control Data Corporation early super-computer information (60bits.net)
CDC 6000 series computers
CDC 7600     (PeeeCeee Mag who got it from CDC) image of 7600
CDC Cyber computers
CDC Cyber computers (Cray-Cyber.org)

CDC Kronos operating system (mid-1970s)
CDC NOS (Network Operating System) (late-1970s)
CDC NOS/VE (Network Operating System/Virtual Environment) (early-/mid-1980s)
William Schaub: Long Ears for Life: building Kermit for NOS2

Whetstone computing speed bench-mark history and results (Roy Longbottom)
more speed measures in millions of floating-point operations per second (MFlOPS) (215? Moffett Park Dr., Sunnyvale Operations/SVLOPS/Bayview Club; now between Java Dr. & Matilda Ave; East of Borregas?)
⋐ontrol ⋑ata Corporation SVLOPS
⋐ontrol ⋑ata Corporation SVLOPS
⋐ontrol ⋑ata Corporation SVLOPS

The Specialty Lab (CDC Central Qualification and Testing Lab)
Jonathan Martin: Control Data Corporation was founded 1957 and had an estimated 65K employees in the early 1980s (encyclopedia.com undated article probably written in early 1990s)

BitSavers: Control Data Corp. Integrated Computer-aided Engineering & Manufacturing (ICEM)) manuals
Computer History Museum: Control Data Corp. manuals

Funding Universe: company histories: Arbitron founded in 1949, bought by Control Data Corp. in 1960, spun out in 2001; radio rating though experimented with TV ratings for several years in mid-1980s (Funding Universe)

Museum at Waalsdorp, Netherlands: background info on NOS/VE
Museum at Waalsdorp, Netherlands: background info on NOS/VE libraries & utilities

DtCyber (desk-top Cyber) Cyber 175/750 emulator developed by Tom Hunter c.2003
Cyber1.org FAQ

Cray-Cyber.org allegedly continues running a Cray and a Cyber with access over the net
HCCC retro: CyberClient
60 bits.net

The BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, National Cash Register, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell)
John C. Dvorak: IBM and the 7 Dwarves
Australian Computer Society: heritage project chapter 8

2010-01-22/2018-02-06: Vangie Beal: Webopedia: the 5 generations of computers
5th generation computer
will the USA lead in quantum computing?

Patrick James Hanratty: ICEM/DDN, which we mostly thought of as 2.5-D parametric/wire-frame CAD/CAM/CAE software, started as his software. CDC had half a dozen guys who ported it to run on Cybers and we paid a small percentage on sales back to Hanratty (on a value-added resale basis), who was supposed to do bug repairs and enhancements. But he & his guys could not keep up with our customers' demands. So, CDC paid them a big chunk of money, hired up, and took on those bug repairs and enhancements. I think they must have hired at least half of the U of Minnesota computer science & mechanical engineering student new grads for at least 2-3 years, a couple from Illinois, 1 or 2 from Purdue, etc., and quite a few CDC internal transfers, as the "manufacturing data center" was converted into the Computer-Integrated Manuacturing (CIM) division. That was about the same time Hanratty released Anvil; I remember seeing their display at a computer graphics conference the Summer we were working on a direct from ComputerVision to ICEM/DDN design file transfer program... which was never sold, nor used except in testing it.
The start-up group, Manufacturing Tech Data Center, had ported ICEM/DDN to run on Data General minicomputers, and we had a small office in the San Diego area, North of UCSD, South of Del Mar, along Sorrento Valley Road, that took care of DG-specific matters.
"The Docs" had Ph.D.s in CS, math, electrical or mechanical engineering, & their offices were on the South-Western end of the 2nd floor at "The Swamp". They added Beziér curves, Gouraud shading, developed our 2-display semi-smart work-station/Schnittstellen (literally: cutting-stand) and ported ICEM/DDN to run on SunOS/Solaris, AT&T UNIX, Silicon Graphics Irix.
Mitch, Lisa, Herman, & a couple others took care to keep the 3rd party software for several kinds of computer-aided engineering (CAE) & solid modeling working with it.
We also had people scoping out links with data-bases for Manufacturing Requirements Planning (MRP), and exploring the shift to OOD/OOP. (In the time since, MRP has expanded into Enterprise Resource Planning, with various privacy-violation schemes built-in, and the Forces of Evil promoting the heck out of it!*+*%$#!)

2010-07-01: Patrick Waurzyniak: SME: Masters of Manufacturing: Patrick James Hanratty
WickedPedia
1998-10-31: American Machinist: the CAD/CAM Hall of Fame: Patrick James Hanratty, John T. Parsons, Ivan E. Sutherland

2021-12-26: History Computer: Ivan E. Sutherland
WickedPedia: Ivan Edward Sutherland
National Inventors Hall of Fame: Ivan E. Sutherland
J.A.N. Lee: IEEE Computer Society: Computer Pioneers: Ivan Edward Sutherland

WickedPedia: Pierre Bézier 1910-09-01 to 1999-11-25

WickedPedia: Henri Gouraud

External links may expire at any time.
Neither this page, nor the opinions expressed or implied in it are endorsed by Michael Badnarik, Ron Paul, Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, Bob Barr, Walter E. Williams, Wayne Allyn Root, Thomas Sowell, Warner Brothers, Gary Johnson, Peter Brimelow, president Donald Trump, nor by my hosts, Kermit and Rateliff.

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