Control Data Corporation (CDC) is one of the pioneering supercomputer firms. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s to what was effectively a spinoff, after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc. (CRI). CDC was one of the nine major computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well known and highly regarded throughout the industry at one time, but today is largely forgotten.
