Company Problems
In 1971 Control Data was undergoing a "belt tightening" due to the cost of an ongoing lawsuit against IBM, and all divisions were asked to reduce their payroll by 10%. Cray begged to be exempted in order to get the 8600 shipping, and when this request was refused he instead had his own pay cut to minimum wage to solve the problem.
By 1972 it appeared that even Cray's legendary module design abilities were failing him in the case of the 8600. Reliability was so poor that it was appeared impossible to get a whole machine working. This was not the first time this had happened, on the 6600 project Cray had to start over from scratch, and the 7600 was in production for some time before it started working reliably. In this case Cray decided the current design was a dead-end, and told William Norris (CDC's CEO) that the only way forward was to redesign the machine from scratch. The finances of the company were dangerous, and Norris decided that he couldn't take the risk; Cray would have to continue with the current design.
In 1972 Cray decided that he couldn't work under such conditions, and left CDC to form Cray Research. For his new work he abandoned the multiprocessor concept, concerned that software of the era would be unable to take full advantage of the CPUs. He may have come to this conclusion after the ILLIAC IV finally entered operation at about the same time, and proved to have disappointing performance.
Team members convinced Norris that the 8600 could be completed even without Cray, and work continued at the Chippewa Lab. By 1974 the machine still didn't work correctly. Jim Thornton's competing STAR design had reached production quality at this point, and the 8600 project was then cancelled. In service STAR proved to have poor real-world performance, and when the Cray-1 entered the market in 1976, CDC was quickly pushed from the supercomputer market. An effort was made to re-enter the market in the 1980s with the ETA-10, but this ended poorly.
Read more about this topic: CDC 8600
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