Ping for your respective lists.
Cray wasn’t Jobs.
Cray was Wozniak.
Good Hunting... from Varmint Al
First two Crays off the production line went to Fort Meade, MD. You can guess who bought them.
Some are interviews with Mr. Cray, others are video recordings of speeches he gave. I believe there is a "story of his life" video too. All are worth watching.
One story I particularly liked was about how they tested the circuit boards for the liquid-cooled Cray 3, an all gallium-arsenide supercomputer that was far ahead of its time.
The circuit boards generated so much heat that they could only operate continuously when submerged in Fluorinert coolant. This of course made it very difficult to attach scope probes and logic analyzers to the various signal pathways.
The solution was a test stand that could run a board in air, but only for one millisecond at a time. The engineers would set up test vectors, then press a button to run for a millisecond, during which time the board would execute something on the order of a million clock cycles worth of processing.
The electronics dictated the shape. Each wire of the backplane had to be made to exact and precise length because the ECL (emitter-coupled-logic) was very, very fast in its day. It was also power-hungry, incredibly electrically noisy and hard to get working reliably.
As I recall, there were exactly four (4) different types of small-medium scale logic circuits in the CPU.
I casually interviewed for field engineering there early in one of my careers but they wouldn’t even look at you if you didn’t have 10 years of experience. And you had to have an unusual skillset - high-speed logic diagnostics AND HVAC (refrigeration was built-into the computer).
You could make a case that what Wozniak did with finesse and as little money and chips as possible, Cray went the other way - that machine really was a “money was no object” computer.
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”.
You might find this interesting.
I’ve always thought that Cray’s were awesome looking. It’s amazing that we can now have as much power in a device we can carry along with us. Unfortunately, it seems that most of that newfound horespower is wasted.
Seymour Cray great American genius.
Steve Jobs, all he knew was marketing. Oh, recent gossip is he ripped off Carly Fiorina at HP but she is alive and Jobs was a short lived phenomena whose wife inherited his 10 billion and is busy blowing it on...what else...liberal crap causes.
You might find this interesting as well;
Safeguard Data-Processing System PDF’s Info:
Introduction and Overview http://srmsc.org/pdf/005214p0.pdf
The Data-Processing System Performance Requirements in Retrospect http://srmsc.org/pdf/005215p0.pdf
Central Logic and Control Operating System http://srmsc.org/pdf/005219p0.pdf