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The book "The Supermen: Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer" (1997) is great. What struck me when reading it was that the
by groundlogic 7y ago
The book "The Supermen: Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer" (1997) is great.
What struck me when reading it was that the Cray 1 that Seymor Cray designed alone in his cabin.. when it went for sale in 1977 for $7.9 million it was a 64-bit single core computer running at 80 Mhz, with 8 MB RAM. This computer could probably have run Quake! In 1977! At a respectable resolution/framerate! In 1977! :)
- kabdib 7y agoGetting a decent frame buffer in those days was a significant challenge, though. It was like "Hey, the University of Qwghlm just got a 512x512x24 display, let's go apply to grad school there!" About 20 years ago I was helping a guy design a vector unit for a new CPU. As I was writing the simulations, I began to appreciate Cray's 70s era designs, and the stuff that we manage to stuff into a few square millimeters of silicon these days. The future is here.
- groundlogic 7y agoAh.. I can imagine all kinds of weird bottlenecks making it hard to deliver a high-res bitmap at a reasonable framerate, or at all, to a screen back then. Anyway, if you end up reading this: I really enjoyed so many of your dadhacker posts, years ago. Thanks.