The Power of the NORC

One of the web pages about the Naval Ordinance Research Computer constructed by IBM for use at the Naval Weapons Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia claims that its performance was unsurpbutted until the Control Data CDC 6600, sometimes regarded as the first supercomputer, became available.

I found that rather surprising. Looking at the Wikipedia article on supercomputers, and leaving out the AN-FSQ-7 computer, which did arithmetic only on 16-bit integers, not floating-point numbers, it seems that it was far surpbutted by both the LARC and the STRETCH, which, like the NORC in its day, were intended to be really fast and powerful machines.

I suppose one could make a case for calling the LARC the "first supercomputer", if by a supercomputer one is only thinking of something sold as a commercial product, like the IBM 360-195 or the CDC 6600 or the Cray-1, rather than something designed especially for one governmental computing requirment, like the ENIAC. Or if one wanted to demand some minimum absolute threshold of performance, or if one only wanted to count solid-state machines.

But, all-in-all, I'm happy enough to agree on the NORC being the first supercomputer; that it remained unsurpbutted for so long, though, seemed hard to credit.

John Savard Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download