Formal unveiling of the ETA-10 scientific supercomputer from Control Data Corp’s 90%+-owned ETA Systems Inc has been an oft-postponed moveable feast, but there is finally a firm time and place – 9am today at Florida State University, in Talahassee, Florida. Although the CMOS machine, which was to have delivered a peak 10Gflops, has been temporarily scaled down to 7Gflops, CDC is still claiming it to be the fastest supercomputer anywhere. The celebration comes at a time when the prospects for the Minneapolis company have improved dramatically: the company just turned its first profit after 10 consecutive quarters of losses, some of which ran into hundreds of millions of dollars. The profit – see page three – does not include any contribution from Commercial Credit either: the financial services business was spun off in November, although CDC retains a 17.8% shareholding in it.
