Discussion on:

Cray-1 supercomputer: How I discovered a dinosaur at the museum

"After the Van de Graaf generator started up we knew that we had velocity of light electrons".

It must be that time of year!

I was thinking about the first computer that I worked on back in the late 60's early 70's a LEO III -
Boy did that make me feel old - even the photo's were in black and white!

It still managed to run the payroll, rents and rates and vaccination and immunisation systems for 4 London Boroughs though. 5bit baudot paper tape!

Steve Shepherd

Thanks for the descriptive narrative on the Cray. I'm not an IT guy. I was interested in computers as a young man. I had a buddy that I ended-up steering into computer programming, and he in turn steered me into mechanical engineering. It worked-out for both of us. It's nice to see the old stuff appreciated. I always liked elegantly simple design myself...

I taught a class at Cray in Chippewa Falls, WI in the mid 80's. It is a small town in northern Wisconsin, also home of Leinenkugel's brewery. I was given a tour of the factory floor and was amazed to see the computers were created using wire wrapping rather than printed circuit boards. These computers were hand built, mostly by women. It was amazing to see the innards of the these machines and the people assembling them. The nickel Leinie's at the nearby bar were also a treat.

I went into the Jodrell Bank museum in the 1980s and recognised a computer that was on display. I designed it in 1963 and I personally commissioned that one. I wonder what has happened to it since the museum closed? Are there any more around? I have seen the one at Bletchley Park but I am certain it was never a working model.

Back then I was programming HP 2100s and DEC PDP-8s. I also did a lot of backplane wire wrapping on prototypes. Having been from Wisconsin, I followed the development of the CRAYs with a little more interest than the average geek, because the east and west coasts always depicted people from Wisconsin as hicks. It was a great source of pride that the fastest computers in the world, for some time, came from a little town in Wisconsin. Thanks for the blast from the past.

"If youre in London, pop in to the Science Museum for a look at the Cray-1"

Actually, I don't have to go more than a couple of miles. I'm in Boulder, CO, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research has their CRAY - 1 on display in the Mesa Lab. I worked there from 1982 to 1987 for Ampex Corp. maintaining a Terabit Memory System that provided the mass storage requirement of NCAR at the time. The CRAY - 1 was still in service as well as a CDC - 7600 which was also designed by Seymour Cray before he went off on his own.

Thanks for the article!