On October 16, 1959, Control Data Corporation announced the CDC 1604, the brand-new company’s first computer and one of the earliest commercially successful fully-transistorized machines on the market. Designed by a young engineer named Seymour Cray, the 1604 was built to outperform the vacuum-tube mainframes of the era while using far less power and space — a 48-bit machine that quickly earned a reputation as one of the fastest computers money could buy. The first units reached customers, including the U.S. Navy, in early 1960, at a price north of $1 million apiece.
The 1604 mattered as much for what it proved as for what it computed. Control Data had only been founded two years earlier, in 1957, after Cray and company co-founder William Norris split off from Sperry Rand. Landing a machine this capable, this fast, meant the scrappy new company could go head-to-head with IBM and the rest of the mainframe establishment. Roughly 50 units eventually sold into real-time data processing, scientific research, and defense work. Cray himself didn’t linger on the 1604 for long — within a few years he moved on to the CDC 6600, widely regarded as the first true supercomputer, and later founded Cray Research, cementing his name as the architect of an entire category of machine.
Source: Computer History Museum, Westport Tech Museum
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