I.e. same reason why it is hard to find information about *any* old
computers, other than a few very popular ones.

There were very few STAR machines made and delivered, in comparison with
their RISC brethern, the 6000 and 7000 series.  The STAR is considered by
some
(me included) to be the CISC-iest machine ever designed.  When you try to
deal with STring ARrays, after all, you get into some interesting microcode.

There is very little existing documentation on the STAR that is available.
Most
of it is hoarded by those who worked on the machine, and as Doug Gwyn put
it,
they have better things to do these days.  But, a careful perusal of ETA-10
and
Cyber 20x architecture (esp. the 203) will give clues into their
predecessor, the STAR-100
and the original STAR-1A and -1B.

Rob

   "A Safari through the Control Data STAR-100 with Gun and Camera"
   by Neil Lincoln

which appeared in:

   AFIPS Conference Proceedings, Vol 47, NCC, June 1978

This is an obscure but seminal (I think) paper that provides an honest
look
at what worked and what didn't, in the development of the STAR-100
during
that era (1964-1969).  For example, he talks about the "goofy" ideas
that were
floating around inside their team, that would have been shot down in
hindsight,
such as:

- Ridiculous schedules for design, development, and delivery

- Accepting penalty clauses in contracts because someone believed the
  ridiculous schedules

- Everyone would learn how to vectorize because (a) it's natural, (b)
it's
  exciting and rewarding, and (c) they would quickly realize that there
  was no alternative to future supercomputing

and others

On the APL influence, Neil Lincoln definitely mentions here that the
early STAR
architects in 1964 had Iverson's book open to Chapter 1.  Not that the
APL
operations were directly copied, but it's clear the influence was there
early on. Later on in the late 60s, (see "Where Should the Dollars Go -
Iverson or Delivery" section), he talks about the conflict between
adding more APL operators vs. real-estate, reliability, performance, and
schedule pressures.

---
Peter Schow

I know half a dozen folk at LLNL who worked on it.

It's generally regarded as "bad blood."  There was also one at LaRC
which was upgraded to a Cyber 203.  You left those off.
The 100 was apparently a very sore point and people got axed, because
of it (the Cray-1 at LANL also had some bad blood with Deimos, but those
people survived to inflict revenge).

Doug noted:

Additionally, I endorse Neil's other papers:

%A N. R. Lincoln
%T Great Gigaflops and Giddy Guarantees
%B Supercomputing
%E N. Metropolis
%E D. H. Sharp
%E W. J. Worlton
%E K. R. Ames
%S Los Alamos Series on Basic and Applied Sciences
%V 7
%I University of California Press
%C Berkeley, CA
%D 1986
%P 16-24
%K trade/popular/business press, industry references, ETA,
%X An amusing talk! Not much technical content, but amusing.

%A Neil R. Lincoln
%T Technology and Design Tradeoffs in the Creation of a Modern Supercomputer
%B Supercomputers, Class VI Systems, Hardware and Software
%E Sidney Fernbach
%I North-Holland
%C Amsterdam
%D 1986
%P 83-112
%K Cyber 205, vector processing,
%K trade/popular/business press, industry references,
%X See the original IEEE TOC article, C-31, no 5, may '82, pages
349-362.

%A Neil R. Lincoln
%T Supercomputers = Colossal Computations + Enormous Expectations +
Renowned Risk
%J IEEE Computer
%V 16
%N 5
%D May 1983
%P 38-47
%K CDC Star-100, Cyber-203, Cyber-205,
%X Another paper which is a retrospective (rather apologetic) on the
CDC Star-100, Cyber 203/205 development.

%A Neil R. Lincoln
%T Technology and Design Tradeoffs in the Creation of a Modern Supercomputer
%J IEEE Transactions on Computers
%V C-31
%N 5
%D May 1982
%P 349-362
%K architecture, parallelism, pipeline, supercomputer, technology,
vector processor,
frecommended, special issue on supersystems
%X Architectural survey of the STAR-100, Cyber 203/205 line
Also printed in Fernbach's "Supercomputers, Class VI Systems..."
book, North-Holland, 1986.
Also reprinted in the text compiled by Kai Hwang:
"Supercomputers: Design and Application," IEEE, 1984, pp. 32-45.
See also the "not as Fun" article.

%A Neil R. Lincoln
%T "Its really not as much fun building a supercomputer as
it is simply inventing one"
%B High Speed Computer and Algorithm Organization
%E D. J. Kuck
%E D. H. Laurie
%E A. H. Sameh
%I Academic Press
%C New York
%D 1977
%P 3-11
%K frecommended, Cyber 205,
Ginsberg biblio:
%X Delightful, entertaining, yet very informative about the
real problems of actually building a supercomputer.
The story has not changed much in the last 10 years.
A "must" reading for anyone interested in computer architecture.
Amos Omondi

and...

STAR-100 was designed in the advanced systems laboratory by J.E. Thornton
and Neil Lincoln.  Thornton was, of course, Cray's protege and the author
of "Design of a Computer: The CDC 6600."  Thornton, Vice President for
Advanced Systems, left CDC in 1973 just as the STAR-100 sh*t must have
really started to hit the fan.  I don't know if he was pushed out,
sensed that he had to get out, or if there were other factors which
led to his decision to leave.

Someone else may correct me but I believe that it was CDC's decision
to drop Cray's 8600 and fund only Thornton's STAR-100 which was
the causal event which led to Cray's leaving CDC in 1972.  IIRC, it
was originally decided to develop both machines but budget considerations
later made that impossible.  CDC decided to keep the STAR-100 program
and kill the 8600.  Interestingly, although this was the first time
that a protege upped the master in the corporation's eye, it wasn't
the last.  Cray would have to live through the experience again when
Cray Research chose Steve Chen's upgraded Cray-1 over Cray's Cray-3
design and Cray, once again, had to leave his company.  Even more interesting
is the change of circumstances.  In the first case, CDC decided to
abandon a relatively conservative upgrade to their existing line
(i.e. the 7600->8600) in order to concentrate on a machine that
was a radical departure from the tried and true.  In the
second case, Cray Research decided to abandon the new architecture
(the Cray-3) in order to concentrate on incremental improvements
to their existing architectures.  Cray himself was on the opposite
side of each situation!

Anyway, the STAR-100 was a radical departure from the 6000
series.  It was, as I recall, a memory/memory machine and
had no internal registers.  Cray must have shuddered at the
complexity of the machine.

In 1979 the STAR-100 hardware was redone.  I don't recall
the changes but the gist was faster parts and thus a
faster machine.  This machine was called the
Cyber 203E.  In 1982 the machine was again upgraded
with faster parts and became the Cyber 205.  That design
eventually morphed into the ETA-10 machine and then things
fell completely apart.

I think in the end it's all moot.  One of these days I will collect the
list of old 205 host sites, but right now I'm just trying to get the list
of Cray-2 sites release into the public domain.  I got us at least 2 ETA
cryostats with Neil's help.

Questions of sizes will likely never fully be known.  I've seen part of
"The Fort's" collection as well as LLNL and LANL, and those are big
honking facilities.

I would look for 203/205 parts to try to preserve it's history better,
but there are far more important machines for me to seek.  I have to
leave it to my friends who are ex-CDC to come forward, organize
themselves and get their story out.  I have sympathy, but the Museum
has the 6600 and 7600 and tons of documents.  But it's not ever clear
what will happen with them except to collect dust.

It's as bad as pulling teeth to try to get the LLNL guys to talk about
STAR-100 stories.

Don't know who the Voigts were.  I met Manny Salas, the director, and
head of computer science.

It seems to be in very good condition.

Something I guess I should have saved.

Outside ARHOPS, yes.  501 was a 4-pipe machine.  505 might have been, also;
IIRC, the commercial folks tried to sell 4-pipe machine time.  Not very
successful.

I do have a STAR-100 part if you really want it.