The first real supercomputer was the CDC 6600, launched in 1964. It used vacuum tubes and ran at 3.1 MHz, delivering over a million instructions per second. It was put to work on NASA weather models, nuclear weapons simulations, and the like, and its punch‑card logs show it actually worked. The stories that grew around it—how fast it was compared to modern GPUs—tend to exaggerate, but the 6600’s documentation proves it was a true machine, not just myth.

It was a humming beast, really. Those vacuum tubes swelled like throats, the fan blades sang, and the whole thing rattled enough to keep your coffee from settling. It was more than a noisy drum; it was a living pulse of computation that made engineers sit up and say, “Now that’s a real beast.”