Home > CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was the successor to the CDC 6600 and had a 27.5 ns clock cycle time with a 60-bit word size. The 7600 was neither source- nor object-code compatible to the CDC 6600.The 7600 did not have the concept of a "byte" for a character. The machine was Freon cooled using piping similar to refrigerators of the time. From the period from about 1969 to 1975, the CDC 7600 was generally regarded as the fastest computer in the world at the time excepting specialized units. The floor footprint was a rectangular, open-boxy shape, almost C-shape so that one could work on either side of the chassis. The machine had multiple functional units, but was not a multiprocessor. The machine initially did not come with software; sites had to be willing to write their own operating system, like LTSS [Livermore Time Sharing System], NCAROS, and others; and compilers like LRLTRAN [Livermore's version of Fortran with dynamic memory management and other non-standard features]. The successor CDC 8600 was never completed, and Seymour Cray went on to form his own company, Cray Research, Inc.
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