CDC 6000 series

The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of the CDC 6200, CDC 6300, CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which were all extremely rapid and efficient for their time. Each is a large, solid-state, general-purpose, digital computer that performs scientific and business data processing as well as multiprogramming, multiprocessing, Remote Job Entry, time-sharing, and data management tasks under the control of the operating system called SCOPE (Supervisory Control Of Program Execution). By 1970 there also was a time-sharing oriented operating system named KRONOS. They were part of the first generation of supercomputers. The 6600 was the flagship of Control Data's 6000 series.

The CDC 6000 series computers are composed of four main functional devices:

The 6000 series has a distributed architecture.

The family's members differ primarily by the number and kind of central processor(s):

Certain features and nomenclature had also been used in the earlier CDC 3000 series:

The only currently (as of 2018) running CDC 6000 series machine, a 6500, has been restored by Living Computers: Museum + Labs It was built in 1967 and used by Purdue University until 1989 when it was decommissioned and then given to the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology before being purchased by Paul Allen for LCM+L.

The first member of the CDC 6000 series was the supercomputer CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray and James E. Thornton in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. It was introduced in September 1964 and performs up to three million instructions per second, three times faster than the IBM Stretch, the speed champion for the previous couple of years. It remained the fastest machine for five years until the CDC 7600 was launched. The machine is cooled by Freon refrigerant.

Control Data manufactured about 100 machines of this type, selling for $6 to $10 million each.