Editing ETA Systems (section)

==Historical development==
[[Seymour Cray]] left CDC in the early 1970s when they refused to continue funding of his [[CDC 8600]] project. Instead they continued with the [[CDC STAR-100]] while Cray went off to build the [[Cray-1]]. Cray's machine was much faster than the STAR, and soon CDC found itself pushed out of the supercomputing market.

[[William Norris (CEO)|William Norris]] was convinced the only way to regain a foothold would be to spin off a division that would be free from management prodding. In order to regain some of the small-team flexibility that seemed essential to progress in the field, ETA was created in 1983 with the mandate to build a 10&nbsp;[[GFLOPS]] machine by 1986.

In April 1989 CDC decided to shut down the ETA operation and keep a bare-bones continuation effort alive at CDC. At shutdown, 7 liquid-cooled and 27 air-cooled machines had been sold.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Booker |first1=Ellis |title=CDC supercomputer swan song |work=Computerworld |date=24 April 1989}}</ref> At this point ETA had the best [[price/performance ratio]] of any supercomputer on the market, and its initial software problems appeared to be finally sorted out. Nevertheless, shortly thereafter CDC exited the supercomputer market entirely, giving away remaining ETA machines free to high schools through the [[SuperQuest]] [[computer science]] competition.