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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
07/19/09
07/19/09
The thing that always gets me about the old Crays is how beautiful they were. Functional and elegant in an obscenely complex way. The workmanship and design evident in every connector, board and panel, a showpiece, not just a mass of technology thrown together to brute-force a result, but a finessed and finely tuned collection of components assembled to create something special, a work of art really. Modern machine may SLAUGHTER even the most powerful of Cray's machines, but they never have that eerie feeling of the future embodied that a Cray 2 has...
07/19/09
07/19/09
He bought it from LearJet for $10K cash, hauled it home in a rented truck, and set it up on the separate 200-amp electrical service he used in that room,which was full of racks. It used a SPARC station as its "BIOS:" you had to log into the SPARC, then tell it to boot the Cray.
07/19/09
07/19/09
"Crayolla! It's magic!" one would yell as yet another oiece of brightly colored creativity fuel was dropped from the mighty computer's dispensing system.
Each machine made just one color too, but the name stuck to this very day.
Now of course they have factories turning the things out by the truckload, but THEN, children, THEN it was...different.
;)
07/19/09
07/19/09
07/19/09
07/19/09
Heehee, we're up to teraflops now amirite?
Take that! seventies!
07/19/09
07/20/09
In Supercomputers yes, but I remember consumer graphics cards hitting the teraflop...
07/19/09
07/19/09
Wikipedia says that the size of a data word on a Cray-1 was 64 bits, so 4 megawords would be basically 256 megabytes of RAM.
As for 160 megaflops of processing power, desktop computers are running easily in the gigaflop range, and supercomputers today are well into the teraflop range. Based on the data for the fastest supercomputer listed at top500.org, it would be roughly 9.3 million times faster than a Cray-1.
07/19/09
07/20/09
07/20/09