As an applications engineer, I worked for a vendor (Dynamotion) to Cray Research. We provided the circuit board drilling machines that could drill diameters as small as 0.0039". To say they pushed the envelope in the drilling process would be an understatement. We were proud to claim Cray Research as our biggest customer.
Great documentary, despite the editing. Who else recalls the film 'The Last Starfighter' from 1984? Rendered on a Cray supercomputer. Fascinated me as a ten year old reading about it back then, and probably a large influence in my decision to study and then go into electronics.
i literally just learned about cray today through a gaming programmer interview and im blown away. this guy deserves way more attention in the computer world
He certainly was brilliant and important, but his field just isn't media sexy as they might say. So much technical jargon and details which obscure all that hard work, out-of-box-thinking and creativity needed to make those machines. They are also very beautiful machines.
Sadly, Seymour died from a traffic accident. You might read his biography: The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer.
I am so glad to have attended Control Data Institute in 1975, and had been fortunate enough to work on a mid-1960's Control Data 3300 computer designed by Seymour Cray. It used a gazillion 1604 logic cards on enormous blackplanes. I remember it was cooled with 40 degree forced air, ducted in from underneath the raised floor. They never shut the air off, so when we installed field change orders, we'd freeze or fingers off! ;)
This is beautiful. I have the word "Cray" together with the image of this misterios tower-like apparatus in my mind since childhood, when I read about it and saw the picture in a book. Glad to see all these ladies and gentlemen being so down to earth and kind.
At the Museum of Industry and Technology, in Chippewa Falls, we have an extensive collection of Cray Supercomputers and items from the company, as well as Some of Seymour Cray's life. We will definitely keep up on the 'posterity.' :)
I also think it's great that the life and work of one of the greatest engineers is preserved. I remember doing a project on supercomputing when I was in Grade 11 data processing class and Cray Research sent me information about their computers to help me. I especially like that Les Davis is speaking extensively through the video. I have read that he was instrumental to Cray Research's success. There was a saying, "When Seymour throws a design out the window, Les catches it." He managed both technological risk and personnel issues for the company and seems to be an all around nice guy. I am hoping that somehow, somewhere, the life that Seymour Cray lived will inspire the next great computer engineer to carry their philosophy and values about architecture forward. That is perhaps the single most important purpose in documenting Cray's life and works. I've made a 3D printable model of a Cray-1 exterior to honor the extraordinary aesthetics of the machine.
It is ironic, in a very sad way, that they opened up with a video of super computer modeling of a car crash and airbag deployment, and Seymor Cray himself was killed in by a drunk driver in 1996 in Colorado.
I named my son after Seymour. He was only 3 years old when Seymour passed. I can't believe it has been 22 years since we lost this great man. The world would be very different if fate had allowed him to go on designing things.
Some more details of that fateful day: A 1974 Chevrolet Camaro driven by Daniel Rarick, 33, of Colorado Springs, following Cray's vehicle, pulled out to pass Cray and clipped a Pontiac Grand Prix in the left-hand lane, forcing the Grand Prix onto the highway shoulder, Wilson said. The Grand Prix came back on the highway, struck Rarick's Camaro and sent it out of control, then struck the left rear of Cray's Cherokee, which went out of control and rolled three times. Rarick was cited for careless driving.
DR. CHEN AND CHRIS HSUNG DESIGNED AND BUILT THE Y-MP. NOT STEVE NELSON. I'll repeat what I said to Steve Nelson when asked to join his group: " Steve Nelson could not design himself out of a paper bag " I was the person who did the clean up after JR cut our budget twice on the MP-64. I still have my my NO MP64 shirt that we made. I was the one with the picture of the 486 die on my office door in the Development Building. I always said that THIS IS WHAT WILL BE OUR COMPETITION. I did the work of establishing how fast a signal moves through 1 gate of a 16 gate array. I still remember the actual PROVEN, REPEATABLE SPEED THROUGH 1 GATE. I worked the MICRO MANIPULATOR and had a FLORINERT COOLANT BATH in the basement lab. I worked with Rich Nyborg, Doug Paffel and Ed Priest. I did the smart thing. I learned about TCP/IP BEFORE that protocol became the www. Thank you, Les for getting on the right track into networking. From Vampire taps to Fiber optics, network security when I showed how easy it was to grab login names and passwords wit my Sniffer, I was on the bleeding edge of the supercomputer that was built by Stanford University by FOLDING@HOME. The ultimate distributive network supercomputer. I threw several servers to make that happen. I have always wondered how much MP-64 went in to build the C-90. Thank you for doing my exit interview, Les. I still don't like Steve Nelson. The same goes to John Rollwagen. Art Blackwell
Why no mention of the J90 or the spinoff to Sun Microsystems? I worked with many of these people and learned so much. Great people and the culture was great until layoffs. Nobody misses those.
because the production value is amateurish. which is no problem in this case, but come on. they couldn't get hold of the one geek in their vicinity with some talent in Audio/Video production?
They had a problem and casually moved a mountain to solve it. 😅 This is something today's world can only dream off. Everyone is doing minimal or less than minimal work to collect a paycheck and nothing else.
yeh I decided to use SparcStation20 4xHypersparc cpus 100MHz and 512Mb ram.. its not a speed demon (some pain with browsers ;) but w3m is useful ). Its my favourite sun - run Solaris 9 - last one before the big changes - also my favourite one. Old computers were so unique - today everything is the same.. I just got bored to death with the PCs. I like how this computer forces me to use the internet in different way - much more focused instead just "browsing" and wasting time watching senseless crap.. of course I have modern hardware to - but it is interesting experiment. It reminds me using an old classic car - with limits, more demanding but satisfying. My eprom battery chip was dead - I figured if I buy 3 replacements and each lasts 25 years... I'm covered till my last day on the planet :D
I was an Engineering Technician and Test Engineer on the Sun E10K(Starfire) and E15K/E25K(Starcat) in 1998-2005. The Starfire centerplane(with 8 system boards per side) interconnect and the stylish cabinet had the Cray influence. The E10K came out of Cray Business Systems Division and Floating Point Systems, but it was a great feeling working this group with the Cray legacy attached.
I don't know why USA haven't supported India , when it came with begging bowl for supercomputer in 1990's . Really uncle sham is great cunning masterpiece.
i think that was cray's downfall as a company to be honest - trying to do too many projects at once - if they concentrated on a single machine at a time i think it might have gone a long way to consolidating company resources and confusing customers less
Supercomputers have always been built totally backwards from the rest of technology. You can clearly see this by looking at modern personal computers over the years and and realizing that NONE of the work on supercomputers were ever used for personal computers. Personal computers were developed outside of the supercomputer industry and they didn't use anything from that field along the way because it was all backwards and forced. Think of a modern PC as a brand new 2017 car, and the supercomputers would be something made just from junkyards. It might work, but it's sure as fuck not pretty.
Completely and utterly wrong! You have no idea what you're talking about. Things that Cray did 40 years ago are only just now finding their way into personal computers. Cray was always light-years ahead of the personal computer. To use your analogy correctly, a Cray is a Lamborghini, an IBM PC is a tricycle, and an Apple computer is a Matchbox toy car that can't even carry a person. Apple used a Cray to help them design the Macintosh you ignoramus... Everyone knows who Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are, but those guys were like kindergarten children in comparison to Seymour Cray. The guy was a genius and one of the true giants of computing. Since his death, the United States has lost it's Number 1 position in the design of supercomputers. Hopefully one day everyone will know Cray's name and he'll take his rightful place in history...
As an applications engineer, I worked for a vendor (Dynamotion) to Cray Research. We provided the circuit board drilling machines that could drill diameters as small as 0.0039". To say they pushed the envelope in the drilling process would be an understatement. We were proud to claim Cray Research as our biggest customer.
Great documentary, despite the editing. Who else recalls the film 'The Last Starfighter' from 1984? Rendered on a Cray supercomputer. Fascinated me as a ten year old reading about it back then, and probably a large influence in my decision to study and then go into electronics.
Maybe the engineers did the editing. They could have used some professional help. But I did enjoy the film
i literally just learned about cray today through a gaming programmer interview and im blown away. this guy deserves way more attention in the computer world
He certainly was brilliant and important, but his field just isn't media sexy as they might say. So much technical jargon and details which obscure all that hard work, out-of-box-thinking and creativity needed to make those machines. They are also very beautiful machines.
Sadly, Seymour died from a traffic accident. You might read his biography: The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer.
@@ByteMeCompletely thanks for reminding me about this awesome guy, had forgot i went on a binge about this yrs ago
I am so glad to have attended Control Data Institute in 1975, and had been fortunate enough to work on a mid-1960's Control Data 3300 computer designed by Seymour Cray. It used a gazillion 1604 logic cards on enormous blackplanes. I remember it was cooled with 40 degree forced air, ducted in from underneath the raised floor. They never shut the air off, so when we installed field change orders, we'd freeze or fingers off! ;)
Very interesting: technical as well as biographical.
I admire the incompetence of the camera operator and audio technician.
Jip Jackson The compliment, the joke, or both? :) You're part of the latter team I presume!
This is beautiful. I have the word "Cray" together with the image of this misterios tower-like apparatus in my mind since childhood, when I read about it and saw the picture in a book. Glad to see all these ladies and gentlemen being so down to earth and kind.
What an amazing piece of computing history! Thanks for sharing this with us :)
Super computers are great, they might even invent stereo audio in the future
That was superb! I'd never seen the 'wiring ladies' or John Rollwagen before. Amazing!
Looking forward to moving up to Chippewa Falls in Summer 2019. I haven't been there since 9th grade in 71/72.
Worked on the ECL2500 Motorola Gate arrays in the Y-MP machine. Nice to see the completed box after all these years :).
In 1988, I was in Germany fixing Gould computers in Essen, and Munchen. I saw a Cray 1 in the Deutches Technical Museum.
These were computers that actually looked like sci-fi ones
I sat on and stood inside a working Cray 1 at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in England back in 1980. I'll never forget that.
Wow! just wow. Thank you for posting this.
Fascinating, especially hearing Mr. Rollwagen tell of spinning off Cray Computer.
Amazing story about amazing people especially the ladies that assembled the thing! (who on earth would give this a thumbs down?)
The same people who always competed unfairly with Mr. Cray: IBM.
@@CyberneticArts There is a memo from Thomas Watson of IBM in it's original form. Enjoy:
www.computerhistory.org/revolution/supercomputers/10/33/62
It is so great that this is kept for posterity.
At the Museum of Industry and Technology, in Chippewa Falls, we have an extensive collection of Cray Supercomputers and items from the company, as well as Some of Seymour Cray's life. We will definitely keep up on the 'posterity.' :)
I also think it's great that the life and work of one of the greatest engineers is preserved. I remember doing a project on supercomputing when I was in Grade 11 data processing class and Cray Research sent me information about their computers to help me.
I especially like that Les Davis is speaking extensively through the video. I have read that he was instrumental to Cray Research's success. There was a saying, "When Seymour throws a design out the window, Les catches it." He managed both technological risk and personnel issues for the company and seems to be an all around nice guy.
I am hoping that somehow, somewhere, the life that Seymour Cray lived will inspire the next great computer engineer to carry their philosophy and values about architecture forward. That is perhaps the single most important purpose in documenting Cray's life and works.
I've made a 3D printable model of a Cray-1 exterior to honor the extraordinary aesthetics of the machine.
kind of the ultimate 'form follows function' product!
It is ironic, in a very sad way, that they opened up with a video of super computer modeling of a car crash and airbag deployment, and Seymor Cray himself was killed in by a drunk driver in 1996 in Colorado.
I named my son after Seymour. He was only 3 years old when Seymour passed. I can't believe it has been 22 years since we lost this great man. The world would be very different if fate had allowed him to go on designing things.
Some more details of that fateful day:
A 1974 Chevrolet Camaro driven by Daniel Rarick, 33, of Colorado Springs, following Cray's vehicle, pulled out to pass Cray and clipped a Pontiac Grand Prix in the left-hand lane, forcing the Grand Prix onto the highway shoulder, Wilson said.
The Grand Prix came back on the highway, struck Rarick's Camaro and sent it out of control, then struck the left rear of Cray's Cherokee, which went out of control and rolled three times.
Rarick was cited for careless driving.
There is no such link to buy this video on the website.
The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer
DR. CHEN AND CHRIS HSUNG DESIGNED AND BUILT THE Y-MP. NOT STEVE NELSON.
I'll repeat what I said to Steve Nelson when asked to join his group: " Steve Nelson could not design himself out of a paper bag "
I was the person who did the clean up after JR cut our budget twice on the MP-64. I still have my my NO MP64 shirt that we made.
I was the one with the picture of the 486 die on my office door in the Development Building. I always said that THIS IS WHAT WILL BE OUR COMPETITION.
I did the work of establishing how fast a signal moves through 1 gate of a 16 gate array. I still remember the actual PROVEN, REPEATABLE SPEED THROUGH 1 GATE.
I worked the MICRO MANIPULATOR and had a FLORINERT COOLANT BATH in the basement lab. I worked with Rich Nyborg, Doug Paffel and Ed Priest.
I did the smart thing. I learned about TCP/IP BEFORE that protocol became the www.
Thank you, Les for getting on the right track into networking. From Vampire taps to Fiber
optics, network security when I showed how easy it was to grab login names and passwords wit my Sniffer, I was on the bleeding edge of the supercomputer that was built by Stanford University by FOLDING@HOME. The ultimate distributive network supercomputer. I threw several servers to make that happen.
I have always wondered how much MP-64 went in to build the C-90.
Thank you for doing my exit interview, Les.
I still don't like Steve Nelson. The same goes to John Rollwagen.
Art Blackwell
Why no mention of the J90 or the spinoff to Sun Microsystems? I worked with many of these people and learned so much. Great people and the culture was great until layoffs. Nobody misses those.
This just happens to be about the early history.
Cray 1: the furniture that also could compute (fast)
im curious how much money the assemblers used to make on average ? Anyone know or know how I can look at up?
what’s wrong with the audio, cannot hear it
Why is the sound only in one ear at a time?
because the production value is amateurish. which is no problem in this case, but come on. they couldn't get hold of the one geek in their vicinity with some talent in Audio/Video production?
Such skills were probably not as commonplace when this video was made. Read the description. The uploader found this video in their local library.
Because there is no need for stereo in this. You can mix the output yourself.
@@GH-oi2jf yes, but why does it bounce between ears?
Amazing.
so interesting
Great info. Videography, not so much.
No sound after 30 seconds!
Great ... but would be better if it were in stereo!
so cray its in mono
But can it run Crysis?
They had a problem and casually moved a mountain to solve it. 😅
This is something today's world can only dream off. Everyone is doing minimal or less than minimal work to collect a paycheck and nothing else.
Omg the editing stinks. Lol. So amazing these old systems. They really pushed technology forward.
SPARCstation till i die! Where my sun fans. :D
+hubzcaps To bad shitty Oracle corporation took over SUN.
yeh I decided to use SparcStation20 4xHypersparc cpus 100MHz and 512Mb ram.. its not a speed demon (some pain with browsers ;) but w3m is useful ). Its my favourite sun - run Solaris 9 - last one before the big changes - also my favourite one. Old computers were so unique - today everything is the same.. I just got bored to death with the PCs. I like how this computer forces me to use the internet in different way - much more focused instead just "browsing" and wasting time watching senseless crap.. of course I have modern hardware to - but it is interesting experiment. It reminds me using an old classic car - with limits, more demanding but satisfying. My eprom battery chip was dead - I figured if I buy 3 replacements and each lasts 25 years... I'm covered till my last day on the planet :D
Awe yeeeeeee Sun ftw!
I use an Enterprise 250 as my homeserver! Runs even better than new!
I was an Engineering Technician and Test Engineer on the Sun E10K(Starfire) and E15K/E25K(Starcat) in 1998-2005. The Starfire centerplane(with 8 system boards per side) interconnect and the stylish cabinet had the Cray influence. The E10K came out of Cray Business Systems Division and Floating Point Systems, but it was a great feeling working this group with the Cray legacy attached.
Shoutouts to SGI
A little disappointed they left out the J90 and the worlds most evil looking supercomputer, the Cray SV1.
"No copying without permission"...
I don't know why USA haven't supported India , when it came with begging bowl for supercomputer in 1990's . Really uncle sham is great cunning masterpiece.
India is a competing nuclear power.
:(
Will it run DOOM?
i think that was cray's downfall as a company to be honest - trying to do too many projects at once - if they concentrated on a single machine at a time i think it might have gone a long way to consolidating company resources and confusing customers less
💕
In two and a half minutes, I bet they've said the words "Chippewa Falls" fifteen times. It's quite annoying.
Supercomputers have always been built totally backwards from the rest of technology. You can clearly see this by looking at modern personal computers over the years and and realizing that NONE of the work on supercomputers were ever used for personal computers. Personal computers were developed outside of the supercomputer industry and they didn't use anything from that field along the way because it was all backwards and forced.
Think of a modern PC as a brand new 2017 car, and the supercomputers would be something made just from junkyards. It might work, but it's sure as fuck not pretty.
Completely and utterly wrong! You have no idea what you're talking about. Things that Cray did 40 years ago are only just now finding their way into personal computers. Cray was always light-years ahead of the personal computer. To use your analogy correctly, a Cray is a Lamborghini, an IBM PC is a tricycle, and an Apple computer is a Matchbox toy car that can't even carry a person. Apple used a Cray to help them design the Macintosh you ignoramus...
Everyone knows who Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are, but those guys were like kindergarten children in comparison to Seymour Cray. The guy was a genius and one of the true giants of computing. Since his death, the United States has lost it's Number 1 position in the design of supercomputers. Hopefully one day everyone will know Cray's name and he'll take his rightful place in history...
Carver - I worked at Cray Research and I don’t get your point. I don’t think there is one.
@@GH-oi2jf I worked there too, I dont remember you..
@@stevegunderson2392 - Didn’t you work in Chippewa Falls? I was in Mendota Heights through the 1980s.