Which was the first supercomputer?
a. CDC 6600
c. IBM 7030 Stretch
Give up? Well the answer is ...
The CDC 6600 from Control Data Corp., is generally recognized as the first
supercomputer, according to Wikipedia. Built in 1964, it was designed by
Seymour Cray, and ran at about 1 megaflop (a million floating point
operations per second). That was about three times faster than the previous
fastest computer, the IBM 7030 Stretch. (Today, an iPhone 3Gs can run at
about 6.42 megaflops.)
The UNIVAC, which first appeared in 1951, was the first commercial computer
produced in the United States.
Seymour Cray left CDC in 1972 to start his own company. The first Cray-1
supercomputer was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1972.