Who designed supercomputers in 1960s at Control Data Corporation (CDC)?

2013

Who designed supercomputers in 1960s at Control Data Corporation (CDC)?

  1. A.

    Alan Turing

  2. B.

    Charles Babbage

  3. C.

    Tim Berners-Lee

  4. D.

    Seymour Cray

Attempted by 55 students.

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: D

Concept: A “supercomputer” is a machine built purely for the maximum processing speed achievable at a given time, and each pioneering era of computing history is tied to a specific figure — 19th-century mechanical calculating engines, 1930s–40s theoretical computability, the late-1980s World Wide Web, and the 1960s–70s earliest high-speed electronic supercomputers, each associated with the engineer who designed them at companies such as Control Data Corporation (CDC).

Application: At CDC, Seymour Cray led the design of the CDC 6600, released in 1964 and widely regarded as the world's first supercomputer, and followed it with the even faster CDC 7600 in 1968. This work made CDC the dominant supercomputer maker of the decade, and Cray later founded Cray Research.

  • Alan Turing formulated the theoretical foundations of computing (the Turing machine) in the 1930s–40s and died in 1954, years before CDC's supercomputers were built.

  • Charles Babbage designed the mechanical Analytical Engine in the 19th century, a full century before CDC or any electronic supercomputer existed.

  • Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 — a software/internet contribution, not 1960s hardware supercomputer design.

Hence, Seymour Cray designed CDC's 1960s supercomputers.

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