Ah, the YMP-C90 (pic at http://www.geocities.jp/takaomitsuji2000/ymp-c90.jpg http://www.geocities.jp/takaomitsuji2000/ymp-c90.jpg)... When I went to secondary

Ah, the YMP-C90 (pic at http://www.geocities.jp/takaomitsuji2000/ymp-c90.jpg http://www.geocities.jp/takaomitsuji2000/ymp-c90.jpg)... When I went to secondary (high) school in the UK, we had to do a work placement week when we were 16. My first choice of company was MicroProse, as they had a big UK office. I wasn't quick enough off the mark with them though, and got the standard "too high demand" letter. Then I was in our career room, and found some random business listings book that had a small call-out for Cray Research. I put a letter together, thinking "there's no way someone as cool as Cray would have spaces," and sent it off. A while later I received a response from a manager, who said (paraphrasing) "nobody's ever asked about this before, we'd love to do it, but we'll have to figure out what you can do." I was rather pleased :) The UK office was mostly support, so I spent a day and a half with the hardware guys who gave me a tour of ECMWF (http://www.ecmwf.int/ http://www.ecmwf.int/) - they were an ongoing Cray customer, and always had the fastest hardware available from them - happened to be the C90 at the time, or "the dustbin". Then it was off to the software support team, who got my 16-year-old self drunk at the local pub (I doubt they knew my age) while hosting a Spanish sysop who was troubleshooting some benchmark results for his employer. The software guys let me loose on a couple of internal Cray machines ('forest' and 'wind') so I could write some quick C programs to see how they compared to the Sparc 5 on my desk. Finally, I sat on the helpdesk team for a day or two, where I fielded live questions from customers ("sorry, we don't support bounds checking in Fortran in your version of UNICOS, it's a known issue and will remain such"). An amazing week. And yes, I still have the T-shirt ;)