Editing Control Data Corporation (section)

== The STAR and the Cyber ==
{{main|CDC STAR-100|CDC Cyber}}

In addition to the redesign of the 8600, CDC had another project called the [[CDC STAR-100]] under way, led by Cray's former collaborator on the 6600/7600, Jim Thornton. Unlike the 8600's "four computers in one box" solution to the speed problem, the STAR was a new design using a unit that we know today as the [[vector processor]]. By highly pipelining mathematical instructions with purpose-built instructions and hardware, mathematical processing is dramatically improved in a machine that was otherwise slower than a 7600. Although the particular set of problems it would be best at solving was limited compared to the general-purpose 7600, it was for solving exactly these problems that customers would buy CDC machines.

Since these two projects competed for limited funds during the late 1960s, Norris felt that the company could not support simultaneous development of the STAR and a complete redesign of the 8600. Therefore, Cray left CDC to form the [[Cray Research]] company in 1972. Norris remained, however, a staunch supporter of Cray, and invested money into Cray's new company. In 1974 CDC released the STAR,<ref>{{cite conference|title=The control data STAR-100: performance measurements|first1=Charles J.|last1=Purcell|date=May 1974|book-title=AFIPS '74: Proceedings of the May 6-10, 1974, national computer conference and exposition|doi=10.1145/1500175.1500257}}</ref> designated as the Cyber 203. It turned out to have "real world" performance that was considerably worse than expected. STAR's chief designer, Jim Thornton, then left CDC to form the [[Network Systems Corporation]].

In 1975, a STAR-100 was placed into service in a Control Data service center which was considered the first supercomputer in a data center.  Founder William C. Norris presided at the podium for the press conference announcing the new service.  Publicity was a key factor in making the announcement a success by coordinating the event with [[Guinness]]; thus, establishing the Star-100 as "The most powerful and fastest computer" which was published in the ''[[Guinness Book of World Records]]''.  The late Duane Andrews, Public Relations, was responsible for coordinating this event.  Andrews successfully attracted many influential editors including the research editor at Business Week who chronicled this publicity release "... as the most exciting public event he attended in 20 years". Sharing the podium were William C. Norris, Boyd Jones V.P. and S. Steve Adkins, Data Center Manager. It was extremely rare for Bill Norris to take the podium being a very private individual.  Also, during the lunch at a local [[country club]], Norris signed a huge stack of certificates attesting to the record which were printed by the Star 100 on printer paper produced in our [[Lincoln, Nebraska]] plant.  The paper included a [[half-tone]] photo of the Star 100.  The main customers of the STAR-100 data center were oil companies running oil reservoir simulations.  Most notably was the simulation controlled from a terminal in Texas which solved oil extraction simulations for oil fields in Kuwait.  A front page ''[[Wall Street Journal]]'' news article resulted in acquiring a new user,  Allis-Chalmers, for simulation of a damaged [[Hydroelectricity|hydroelectric]] [[water turbine|turbine]] in a Norwegian mountain hydropower plant.

A variety of systems based on the basic 6600/7600 architecture were repackaged in different price/performance categories of the [[CDC Cyber]], which became CDC's main product line in the 1970s. An updated version of the STAR architecture, the Cyber 205, had considerably better performance than the original. By this time, however, Cray's own designs, like the [[Cray-1]], were using the same basic design techniques as the STAR, but were computing much faster.  The Star 100 was able to process vectors up to 64K (65536) elements, versus 64 elements for the Cray-1, but the Star 100 took much longer for initiating the operation so the Cray-1 outperformed with short vectors.

Sales of the STAR were weak, but Control Data Corp. produced a successor system, the Cyber 200/205, that gave Cray Research some competition. CDC also embarked on a number of special projects for its clients, who produced an even smaller number of [[black project]] computers. The [[CDC Cyber#Cyberplus or Advanced Flexible Processor (AFP)|CDC Advanced Flexible Processor]] (AFP), also known as CYBER PLUS, was one such machine.

Another design direction was the "Cyber 80" project, which was aimed at release in 1980. This machine could run old 6600-style programs, and also had a completely new [[64-bit]] architecture.  The concept behind Cyber 80 was that current 6000-series users would migrate to these machines with relative ease.  The design and debugging of these machines went on past 1980, and the machines were eventually released under other names.

CDC was also attempting to diversify its revenue from hardware into services and this included its promotion of the [[PLATO (computer system)|PLATO computer-aided learning system]], which ran on Cyber hardware and incorporated many early computer interface innovations including bit-mapped touchscreen terminals.