Editing History of computing hardware (section)

===Transistor supercomputers===
[[File:University of Manchester Atlas, January 1963.JPG|thumb|The University of Manchester Atlas in January 1963]]
The early 1960s saw the advent of [[Supercomputer|supercomputing]]. The [[Atlas (computer)|Atlas]] was a joint development between the [[Victoria University of Manchester|University of Manchester]], [[Ferranti]], and [[Plessey]], and was first installed at Manchester University and officially commissioned in 1962 as one of the world's first [[supercomputer]]s – considered to be the most powerful computer in the world at that time.{{sfn|Lavington|1998|p=41}} It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost.{{sfn|Lavington|1998|pp=44–45}} It was a second-generation machine, using [[Discrete device|discrete]] [[Bipolar junction transistor#Germanium transistors|germanium]] [[transistor]]s. Atlas also pioneered the [[Atlas Supervisor]], "considered by many to be the first recognisable modern [[operating system]]".{{sfn|Lavington|1998|pp=50–52}}

In the US, a series of computers at [[Control Data Corporation]] (CDC) were designed by [[Seymour Cray]] to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance.<ref name=chen>{{cite book |title=Hardware software co-design of a multimedia SOC platform |author1=Sao-Jie Chen |author2=Guang-Huei Lin |author3=Pao-Ann Hsiung |author4=Yu-Hen Hu |year=2009 |pages=70–72}}</ref> The [[CDC 6600]], released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer.<ref>{{cite book |title=History of computing in education |first1=John |last1=Impagliazzo |first2=John A. N. |last2=Lee |year=2004 |isbn=1-4020-8135-9 |page=172 |publisher=Springer |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=J46GinHakmkC&pg=PA172 |access-date=2016-06-04 |archive-date=2023-02-02 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230202181649/https://books.google.com/books?id=J46GinHakmkC&pg=PA172 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |title=The American Midwest: an interpretive encyclopedia |first1=Richard |last1=Sisson |first2=Christian K. |last2=Zacher |year=2006 |isbn=0-253-34886-2 |page=1489 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=n3Xn7jMx1RYC&pg=PA1489 |publisher=Indiana University Press |access-date=2016-06-04 |url-status=live |archive-date=2023-02-02 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230202181649/https://books.google.com/books?id=n3Xn7jMx1RYC&pg=PA1489}}</ref> The CDC 6600 outperformed its predecessor, the [[IBM 7030 Stretch]], by about a factor of 3. With performance of about 1&nbsp;[[FLOPS|megaFLOPS]], the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the [[CDC 7600]].