CDC 6600 - Why so awesome?

Yes. The 6600 was an amazing engineering accomplishment. It had extremely fast memory for its day (under a microsecond access time, in 1964). It could run several million instructions per second. Floating point add in half a microsecond, multiply in one microsecond. Lesser known things, like context switching ("exchange jump") in about 4 microseconds (!). And divide was done two bits per clock tick rather than the usual one bit per tick; essentially it was doing long division base 4 rather than base 2 as is common. Also a disk drive (6603) that was WAY faster than its peers because it recorded data in 12 bit words parallel rather than using a serial bit stream. I believe something similar was also done in the Cray 1, but CDC had it a decade earlier. paul