He wasn't. The CDC 6600 cost IBM some prestige, but it didn't put a dent in IBM's sales, which were about to skyrocket due to the 360 series.
The 6600, and no doubt Watson was lectured on it, was an extremely specialised machine - it had 60 bit words and that was it. No bytes, shorts, or anything similar. It was designed for floating point math. IBM had machines for science and business that were entirely different and incompatible prior to the 360.
I think that misses the point of the memo. The 6600 was certainly something IBM had resources to design and market yet for some reason it couldn't.
Due to CDC 6600, IBM lost almost completely the market for what today would be called high-performance computing, which was then dominated for 3 decades by CDC and then by Cray, after Seymour Cray left CDC.
However, during that time the market for lower-cost and acceptable performance computers was expanding very quickly, so IBM had growing revenues and profits, without being affected by the loss of a smaller market.
They were more strongly affected by the ascension of DEC, as the main vendor of minicomputers, which took the lower end of the market from IBM, but the medium-performance market, especially for business data processing, where the greatest profits were achievable, remained dominated by IBM, so they had little to worry about.
As a response to CDC 6600, IBM had the internal development project ACS (Advanced Computer Systems), which was eventually cancelled, as diverting resources from the money maker that was the IBM System/360 line.
Had ACS not been cancelled, it would have had good chances to become the fastest computer of the world, because its design team invented many techniques that were introduced in computers only almost a quarter of century later, e.g. unrestricted out-of-order and superscalar execution with fine-grained multi-threading.
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
I never imagined he’d be caught by that mistake.
KerrAvon · · focus · HN ↗
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
varjag · · focus · HN ↗
adrian_b · · focus · HN ↗
However, during that time the market for lower-cost and acceptable performance computers was expanding very quickly, so IBM had growing revenues and profits, without being affected by the loss of a smaller market.
They were more strongly affected by the ascension of DEC, as the main vendor of minicomputers, which took the lower end of the market from IBM, but the medium-performance market, especially for business data processing, where the greatest profits were achievable, remained dominated by IBM, so they had little to worry about.
As a response to CDC 6600, IBM had the internal development project ACS (Advanced Computer Systems), which was eventually cancelled, as diverting resources from the money maker that was the IBM System/360 line.
Had ACS not been cancelled, it would have had good chances to become the fastest computer of the world, because its design team invented many techniques that were introduced in computers only almost a quarter of century later, e.g. unrestricted out-of-order and superscalar execution with fine-grained multi-threading.