These Computers Changed the World

My father was a personnel manager for CDC in the 70's. He started in Minnesota and then moved to California when they built their facility in La Jolla. In 1973 when my father was working on his PhD he would go to the office on weekends to run punch cards through the computer for statistical analysis of manager self-assessments. I remember playing tic-tac-toe on the console with a guy while my dad was running those punch cards. That guy was Seymour Cray.

I worked for a company that partnered with Cray Research to distribute their UniChem quantum mechanics software. While we were at their HQ, we saw a machine (I think it was a C90) in the process of construction and one of our scientists said something like "Oh, I see you changed the color" because it was a different color than the C90 he'd used in grad school. The response was "For thirty million dollars we'll paint it whatever color the buyer wants."

Cray certainly made a name for himself. Maybe it's an age thing, I'm in my 50's, but Cray machines were almost like mythological creatures. The guy really had an enormous impact.

It's unbelievable to me how much those early days of ERA sound like modern IT and the tech industry. Over budget projects, having to raise venture capital, "meme stock"ing yourself to the every-man, Cray acting like a "veteran engineer" straight out of college, pivoting, mergers... it's never stops with this story and it's no different today.

Cray found it funny that Apple used his machines to create the Macs while he used the Macs to make his super computers 😆 Jobs and Cray both made jokes about it 😆

I love the detail in this video. It reminds me of a story I heard at Ohio Supercomputer Center! In 1987 OSC got a Cray X-MP/24. In 1989 they replaced it with a Cray Y-MP8/864. Both machines had eight stacked processor boards submerged in Fluorinert and each required an outboard Heat Exchanger Unit. They made a lot of heat. The parking lot of the Supercomputer Center had a LOT of air conditioning compressor units in it. But they weren't exactly tidy. Some of them were pretty crooked. Because when they had done the changeover to the Y-MP8, they didn't want any downtime. They had the X-MP and Y-MP both online for awhile. They said the parking lot looked weird because the asphalt had actually melted and got all gooey when both Crays were running. The storage situation for supercomputers was weird. You had these fast machines, but they were hooked into '80s storage. OSC had hard drives that looked like rows of industrial washer/dryers. They had room-sized reel-to-reel tape storage jukebox with a robot arm to retrieve tapes! In 1992 I think OSC had just taken out the robot arm and put in a 1.2TB storage system which required an additional Cray Y-MP 2E to manage storage. Supercomputers just kinda morphed into clusters. There was sorta a mental turning point for everybody when Toy Story came out in 1995 and everybody knew it was made on a render farm of 100+ SPARCstations. It made Crays seem like old news. The last Cray they had at OSC I think was the Cray T3E-600/LC they got in 1997 which itself was running 136 DEC Alpha chips. A little more random backstory... I grew up in rural Ohio. In 1987 Ohio State University started Ohio Supercomputer Center with a lot of state funding. Every university had some access, and they sold time to businesses. I got a Commodore 64 for my 8th birthday and really lived/breathed computers. In 1991 I was 15 and I was basically the only computer nerd in Springfield, Ohio. I did weird things like begging my parents for nothing but a Turbo Pascal 5.5 compiler for my 386SX/16 for Christmas. This guy Brian Fargo made a lot of late '80s video games and I wrote him asking how I could make video games and he actually wrote back! I filled out an application to go to the Supercomputer Center's "Summer Institute" for high school kids. One question asked you to make a program which found all numbers which were both prime and fibonacci numbers up to 1000. Pick any language. It was the only programming question! It seemed too easy, so I thought I should do something clever. Most people knew a little BASIC at best. I wrote a super-short recursive Pascal function which counted Fibonacci numbers up to 1000 then fell out of recursion checking if they were prime. I was one of the 14 kids accepted. When I got there the next summer I just wanted to know how they graded that question! So I finally found the director Al Stutz and asked, and he said I was actually the only one who answered it correctly LOL! The summer of 1992 was a weird time. People didn't have the Internet. 14.4k modems were a new thing. There were a few BBS-es in Dayton, Ohio I could call. Everything else would be long distance. Prodigy and AOL existed, but they were just basically chatrooms and email. They weren't connected to the Internet. Because the Internet was just .gov and .mil and .edu sites. There wasn't much to do. At OSC in 1992, though, they had a lot of machines hooked up to the Internet. They even had a ton of NeXT cubes! And Steve Jobs actually came to OSC to talk about them! And OSC had a fat fibre connection! But the Internet had really barely even progressed past being DARPANET. The only thing to really do on the Internet was look for pirated games or soft-core porn. There wasn't much of any WWW. You just kinda had to know the address of something. But if you did, nothing had much security. You could just FTP to wuarchive.wustl.edu and browse everything that nerds had decided to share on the network. College FTP servers were mostly scans of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The newest game was Wolfenstein 3D. The only network game was NetHack. Gaming didn't get big till Duke Nukem 3D and then Quake and WarCraft 2. The Internet became a lot more interesting after I started pirating PSX games and playing Quake. Anyway, I love that this video has meaningful illustrations instead of just a buncha nearly-irrelevant stock photos.

The original 'Tron' movie graphics were done using special CRT-based film scanners and recorders. They were connected to a Cray I/O processor with then-unheard-of 100 megabytes of RAM. The graphics were computed using the Cray computer, then recorded back to film. I had the privilege of working on the scanners/recorders many years later when they were upgraded with more RAM and HiPPI 100 MB/sec. I/O interfaces.

Fun fact. They’re still making supercomputers to this day in Chippewa Falls. They were eventually bought out by HP Enterprises couple years back, but my brother works there and the company is still involved with Los Alamos too.

This was a fantastic presentation! Well done! As an aging computer nerd that came of age in the 90's, Cray still had a whole mystique around them even going into 2K. The legend was so strong it took a long time for people to forget the name. Them and Silicon Graphics.

With a C130 at the Allied Air Base in France in 1945 it seems the Crays helped pioneer some Skynet style temporal devices too.

I grew up in Livermore, and worked at Sandia Livermore in the 1980s and 1990s. Our Cray's (X-MP and Y-MP) were giant money pits for the users. I remember the computing department having utter fits when other departments started getting desktop workstations like the first Sun SPARCstations and Silicon Graphics machines. I spent a full year porting all of the programs we had on the Crays to those machines so we could save huge amounts of case money. While the engineering and materials departments were moving to these small, fast machines the computing department was buying odd ball machines like Stardent (or the earlier versions from Ardent and Stellar) and continued to push for shared computing platforms.

I remember Cray being synonymous with supercomputing, even into the '90s. You couldn't mention one without the other also being considered. If I remember correctly, the movie The Last Star Fighter, a pioneer in cinematic CGI, used a Cray X-MP as part of its graphics pipeline.

I remember an old mythical rumor many, many years ago that a Cray system had finished an infinite loop in something like a week of continuous operation.

I used these a bit. In 1971 and 1982 I used a CDC 6400 at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tuscon. Fast machine with six peripheral processors, but its memory was very small. A lot of software ran on FORTH, which is unquely miserly in use of RAM. In 1987 I used a Cray 1 (or X-MP?) at the University of Toronto, by this time remotely via Internet. The funny thing is that these days a $10 Raspberry Pi outperforms these machines (at least for pure scalar number-crunching). Massive superscalar paralellism has taken over, with GPUs adding more punch yet. But the CDC and Cray machines had a certain magic for scientists in the day.

This one guy seems to have pioneered many computer fundamentals that we now take for granted.

Even though the philosophies of single supercomputers lost to the distributed computers of today. One thing is for certain... The Cray computers looked just damn cool. :D

Ah, the Cray Supercomputer, I can hardly wait to get a Cray emulator on my Raspberry Pi.

I was introduced to computers in college, circa 1975. Some kind of mainframe in the basement of a building; punch cards, teletype card punchers, etc. I remained a computer nerd throughout my career(s) - about 40 years. Pretty much all along the way, when the name "CRAY" was mentioned it was almost as if you could hear the "Ahhhhh!" soundbite of 'angels singing' used in movies and on TV. 😄

It is really shocking to consider how revolutionary the transistor really was. Especially when you consider how simple they are. They can make transistors now so small they are made with just a small handful of molecules.

This was a bit of a trip down memory lane, I operated a couple of Crays back in the 80's, a Cray-1, then a Cray X-MP. The Cray-1 was rumoured to be #1 which Cray were installing in a customers site while 'their' machine was being built.