Editing ETA Systems (section)

==Software==
[[Software]] for the ETA-10 line was initially regarded as a disaster. When CDC and ETA first designed the ETA architecture, they made the conscious decision not to merely port the CDC VSOS operating system from the existing CDC Cyber 205.  It was felt by both the vendor, and the existing customer base (who wrongly believed that their vendor knew best), that a new OS needed to be written to extract the best performance from the hardware.

When the first ETA-10 E initially shipped in 1986 there was no [[operating system]] for the machines. Programs had to be loaded one at a time from an attached [[Apollo Computer]] [[workstation]], run, and then the supercomputer rebooted to run the next program.

At the time [[Unix]] was making major inroads into the supercomputing fields, but ETA decided to write their own [[EOS (operating system)|EOS]] operating system, which wasn't ready when the first machines were delivered in late 1986 and early 1987. An operating system based on [[UNIX]] [[System V]] became available in 1988, as a result of porting work done under contract by the Canadian firm [[HCR Corporation]],<ref>{{cite news <!--BD https://www.cbronline.com/news/human_computing_resources_and_eta_systems_are_still_working_together --> | title=Human Computing Resources and ETA Systems Are Still Working Together |work=Computergram International | publisher=Computer Business Review | date=14 July 1987}}</ref> at which point it looked like the machine might finally succeed. Many sites that had refused to pay for their machines due to the low quality of EOS found ETA's UNIX completely usable and were willing to accept delivery.

ETA's demise was not based solely on operating system choice or existence.  The [[Fortran]] compiler (ftn200) had not changed significantly from the CDC205.  This compiler retained vendor-specific programming performance features (known as the Q8* subroutine calls) in an era when supercomputer users were realizing the necessity of source code portability between architectures.  Additionally, the [[compiler optimization]]s were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors such as NEC, or at [[Cray|Cray Research]] and the newer minisupercomputer makers.

In general, computer hardware manufacturers prior and up to that period tended to be weak on software.  Libraries and available commercial and non-commercial (soon to be called [[open-source software|open-source]]) applications help an installed base of machines.  CDC was relatively weak in this area.