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The CDC-6000 and Cray-1 designed by Seymour Cray are the most admired, hands down. It is also notable that quite a bit of R&D was done in Chippewa Falls, WI, w

The CDC-6000 and Cray-1 designed by Seymour Cray are the most admired, hands down. It is also notable that quite a bit of R&D was done in Chippewa Falls, WI, which is just a regular old town in America's Dairyland.

arminiusreturns 7y ago
I'm no architect but I loved the Cray-2. I took over an old datacenter that had one just sitting there and a sense of awe hit me every time I saw it. What cost 12M brand new and was a marvel of engineering (12x faster than Cray-1!) was just sitting there collecting dust. Crazy world this is. They eventually sold it to a collector I think.
- kjs3 7y ago
  The Y/MP I got to use was pretty cool too...a multiprocessor Cray. But then that's a Chen design and I don't imagine Seymour would approve of everything that went into it.
  - LgWoodenBadger 7y ago
    In college our ACM chapter named its DEC machine (I think it was a Tru64, but it's so long ago I don't remember) "cray-ymp." If you were a member of the ACM you got an account on it, and I used to MUD from it. One of the MUD admins was astounded when he noticed I was playing from what he thought was a real Cray Y/MP. If I was smarter I would have played along. Alas...
    - kjs3 7y ago
      Missed opportunity for amusement. Funny enough the Y/MP-48 was running Unicos (Cray's mostly-Unix) and someone had compiled nethack or rouge or something similar and was playing it until he had sucked up all the funny-money the department had budgeted for the year (yeah...we got accounted for CPU time, and yeah...someone screwed up the quotas). There was a kerfuffle....
kragen 7y ago
Yeah, both the CDC 6600 and the Cray 1 did things that nobody even imagined were possible before. There were a bunch of attempts to do what the Cray-1 did, but none of them worked. Kind of like how C (about the same time) was the first portable language you could write an OS in.

arminiusreturns 7y ago

I'm no architect but I loved the Cray-2. I took over an old datacenter that had one just sitting there and a sense of awe hit me every time I saw it. What cost 12M brand new and was a marvel of engineering (12x faster than Cray-1!) was just sitting there collecting dust. Crazy world this is. They eventually sold it to a collector I think.

kjs3 7y ago
The Y/MP I got to use was pretty cool too...a multiprocessor Cray. But then that's a Chen design and I don't imagine Seymour would approve of everything that went into it.
- LgWoodenBadger 7y ago
  In college our ACM chapter named its DEC machine (I think it was a Tru64, but it's so long ago I don't remember) "cray-ymp." If you were a member of the ACM you got an account on it, and I used to MUD from it. One of the MUD admins was astounded when he noticed I was playing from what he thought was a real Cray Y/MP. If I was smarter I would have played along. Alas...
  - kjs3 7y ago
    Missed opportunity for amusement. Funny enough the Y/MP-48 was running Unicos (Cray's mostly-Unix) and someone had compiled nethack or rouge or something similar and was playing it until he had sucked up all the funny-money the department had budgeted for the year (yeah...we got accounted for CPU time, and yeah...someone screwed up the quotas). There was a kerfuffle....

kragen 7y ago

Yeah, both the CDC 6600 and the Cray 1 did things that nobody even imagined were possible before. There were a bunch of attempts to do what the Cray-1 did, but none of them worked. Kind of like how C (about the same time) was the first portable language you could write an OS in.