1957 founded by ex-ERA employees in Minneapolis, Minnesota

1958 Seymour Cray joins CDC

1959 CDC 1604 first shipment. This a 48-bit machine close to the von Neumann proposal, with added index registers. Related to the ERA 1103A.

1959 CDC 160 first shipment. This is a 12-bit computer, the first minicomputer. Strong influence on DEC PDP early models as well as all further minicomuters. Used either stand-alone or as frontend to the 1604.

1962 CDC 3000 family, not done by Seymour Cray (who is working on the 6600 together with Thornton and a design crew totaling 34, at Chippewa Falls). Upward compatible to 1604, with added functionality, speed, and system variants.

1964 CDC 6600 first shipment. Speed is 50 times the 1604, depending upon application somewhere around 1 MFLOPS, 60 bit words. Marks the starting point of Seymour Cray machines dominance in high performance scientific computation. Introduces larger working store (set of registers), peripheral processors (closely related to the 160) for I/O, very high bandwidth central memory (32 banks at 1000 nsec cycle supporting a CPU at 100 nsec cycle). RISC-type instruction set with 15-bit and 30-bit formats. A single instruction (exchange jump) saves and restores the full working store.

1965 CDC 6000 family. Comaptible slower and cheaper processors, dual processors, extended core storage (2MW)

1969 CDC 7600 first shipment, 4-5 times the speed of the 6600, largely compatible. The Cyber 960-31 operated by cray-cyber.org is of about 1/2 the performance of this machine, and software compatible to the 6600.

1972 Seymour Cray leaves CDC to found Cray Research, Inc.

1974 Cyber 70 family

1976 CDC Star-100 vector computer, first delivered to Lawrence Livermore Lab. Thornton is lead designer.

1978 Cyber 170 family

1980 Cyber 200 family, improved versions of the STAR-100

1982 Cyber 180 family, 64-bit virtual memory family, with 60-bit real memory (6000, 70, 170) compatibility mode

1987 ETA-10, successor to Cyber 200 family. Neil Lincoln chief designer.
on ETA systems
on the ETA-10
on the ETA closing

Cyber 17/18/1700 minicomuters

Advanced Flexible Processor, CyberPlus VLIW machines

peripherals

4xxx series

A table of CDC mainframe machines may be found here

More on CDC and ETA on CDC/ETA and others
on CDC including CyberPlus