Remembering Seymour Cray [Hackaday]

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If you think of supercomputers, it is hard not to think of Seymour Cray. He built giant computers at Control Data Corporation and went on to build the famous Cray supercomputers. While those computers aren’t especially amazing today, for their time, they were modern marvels. [Asianometry] has a great history of Cray, starting with his work at ERA, which would, of course, eventually produce the computer known as the Univac 1103.

ERA was bought up by Remington Rand, which eventually became Sperry Rand. Due to conflict, some of the ERA staff left to form Control Data Corporation, and Cray went with them. The new company decided to focus on computers to do simulations for things like nuclear test simulations.

To save money, the new company used out-of-spec transistors, pairing them so they’d work correctly. In 1960, the company delivered the CDC 1604, a million-dollar computer that ran at 200 kHz. It was the most powerful computer of its day. It was solid state with a 48-bit word. Core memory was 32K words (192 Kbytes). The company touted its “small size” (fits in a 20-foot by 20-foot room!).

Cray would eventually sour on CDC and founded Cray Research in 1972. Before long, though, Cray stepped down as CEO of Cray Research and founded the Cray Computer Corporation.

While early Cray designs were technically successful, growing technology allowed other companies to produce cheaper supercomputers. In addition, the need for supercomputers and how they were built was changing. Cray Computer Corporation went bankrupt in 1995. Cray Research continued without Cray at the helm, but attempts to access a broader market didn’t really work out.

Silicon Graphics bought Cray Research in 1996, selling some of it to Sun. That was the same year Seymour died in a traffic accident at age 71. By 2000, Cray Research was sold again to Tera Computer, which changed its name to Cray. However, they also had a rock road in the supercomputer market. They sold some assets to Intel in 2012 and in 2019 were bought by Hewlett Packard.

There is a lot of history in this video, and it would be amazing to see what Seymour Cray could have done with an unlimited budget and no business necessities.

Want to play with a Cray? Simulation is going to be easier than buying surplus. We’ve done our own biography of Mr. Cray, if you want some additional reading.