Posted on 10/02/2015 6:56:09 PM PDT by dayglored
Before Steve Jobs, there was Seymour Cray father of the supercomputer and regarded as something close to a God in the circles he moved in.
Jobs Apple Computer is reputed to have bought one of Seymours massive machines back in the day: a Cray, to design the brand-new Macintosh personal computer.
This would have been a significant moment for a man of Jobs' character, not prone to flattering the inventions or ideas of others. In return, Cray is said to have quipped that he'd bought a Mac to design the next Cray.
Cray who would have been 90 years old this week was the engineering brain behind a family of systems that broke ground in architecture and performance. They broke new ground on price, too: Crays computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the Cray-1 weighing in at $8.8m an estimated $34m in todays money.
This meant Crays could be afforded only by the top elite boffins in the arenas of science and the military, who used them to crunch vast models on weather prediction and the potential fallout from nuclear bombs. Such systems were out of the price range of even the biggest private firms.
Irony, indeed, given Jobs collaborator Steve Wozniak built the Macintosh in order to democratise computing, as he told your correspondent back in 2011.
Remarkably, and despite the price, it was Crays computers which dominated high-performance computing (HPC) for 30 years, seeing off even the mighty IBM. Buying a Cray became like buying IBM elsewhere: it wouldn't get you fired.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
Yep, that would do it... wow.
Yep. Years ago I designed a few products with ECL -- wonderful non-saturating/linear differential logic -- and had the "luxury" of using chips with one flip-flop per IC so I didn't have to build up the flops from gates.
The noise wasn't so much the logic gates themselves as it was the power busses and the 50-ohm termination supply. It took an outrageous amount of supply bypass capacitance, carefully distributed, to keep the thing stable.
But once you had it, it ran beautifully. I was never disappointed by my ECL circuits. Hell to build, but man they ran great.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
early Crays were octal. Hex came along later.
Seymour Cray was killed in a traffic accident in Colorado Springs on the Academy Blvd. entrance to I-25 (North side of town). His computer company was on North Nevada avenue, just 3 miles from that scene.
After his death, they re-engineered the intersection. I lived at Colo Spgs at the time, and while visiting I cannot drive by that spot without thinking of him.
Hey, let's not disparage the abacus! When I was a young man, my mom would challenge me to calculate figures, me with a calculator, she with an abacus. She won every time. In the old days people relied on their minds, not computers, and got the job done. So let's just say the DemonKKKrats use broken marbles to attempt counting.
Actually I'm more of a slide rule man. :)
My favorite geek joke from that era was, “Hey, did you hear about the Cray? It came out of an infinite loop in five minutes”.
CDC tended to use hex. Octal and hex are both representations of binary.
Well, sort of. The Cray had quite a number of ports into memory to perform I/O. I saw a Cray that was front-ended with eight IBM 360s, each tasked with reading multiple tape and disk drives, card readers, and a fair number of 1403-N1 line printers concurrently. While the chips of today are amazingly fast, they do not interface with the world through so many peripherals. Also, the Cray had a floating point word size that today's microcomputers don't even come close to matching. The Cray was a floating point number cruncher, not a mere 32 or 64 bits in width. It consisted of a number of cores. The processor in an SD card doesn't even come close to those capabilities.
The Motorola 68000 family was very much like a PDP-11 with twice as many registers, and 32 bit ones at that.
I cut my teeth on an IBM 1130.
I walked into that space within the Circle of Cray. It felt almost like communion with God.
The only PDP-11s I worked on directly were LSI-11/23 boxes -- one was in a Tektronix 8550 development system around 1982 and the other was the company main computer used for everything from secretarial memos to engineering software cross-compiles. I managed to snarf a copy of Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT) for the Tek box and after hours would reboot the box in RT-11 and run Adventure until the wee hours... ("You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building...")
I loved programming the 68000. What a lovely, symmetrical, easy to work with CPU. Got to write driver code for some handheld devices (based on a Dragonball CPU with a 68K core), only for half a year or so, but it was fun while it lasted.
That’s very interesting.
I’d always just assumed the Cray was a 32 bit machine.
The physical construction of the Cray looked like it was built by a plumber... all those copper pipes and fittings :-)
hahahahaha :-)
"The Trachtenberg Speed System Of Basic Mathematics".
I have an old copy.. I think it's downloadable for free now.
I taught the Cray XMP Operating System for Cray back in the early 80s.
I studied that while in middle school, on my own in the public library. I was a geek and math major. Fast way to do multiplications in your head by criss-crossing columns of digits. My mom still beat me using her abacus.
You might find this interesting.
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