I used CDC computers 1986-92. They sucked, and CDC employees could not comprehend that they sucked. They had convinced themselves that their alternate universe was real.
The 180/990 and the 205 were a pretty good FORTRAN vector machines if that was the problem you wanted to solve; the compiler was quite good. The other 170/180s were...for everything else...not so much. That boat had sailed.
Incompatible, increasingly archaic platforms, the best of those optimal for batch Fortran number crunching, counter to industry growth/interest. Organizational metastasis with a next gen platform (Cyber 180 as Star was stillborn - CISC from hell as 2nd system(s) syndrome) only at the end of the decade. Standards, coupled with profound organizational incompetence, ground it to dust. They made really good OEM disk drives for a while but sold the business off to fund their continuing failures.
There really needs to be a history that’s not an encomium to William Norris, Philosopher King of CDC.
To me, the system ran very well.
Sad to see all those computer companies disappear over the years, I think there may be only 3 or 4 left making big iron.
One thing about the CDC - it had perhaps the worst command interface I've run into. Data files were modeled as tapes, and you had to keep rewinding them.
Compiling a program appended to the object file, but running ran the start of the file, so you needed to rewind between, lest you run an old version. Much time lost trying to figure out why changes were ineffective.
FORTRAN variables had 8 significant characters, but the linker had only seven, so it was possible to get unintentional aliases.
As a grad student, I got to use a VAX.