When I was a kid I helped my grandpa move out of his office when he retired. He was a senior engineering fellow with Monsanto, specializing in bubble trays in r

When I was a kid I helped my grandpa move out of his office when he retired. He was a senior engineering fellow with Monsanto, specializing in bubble trays in refinery processes. He worked out of their big campus in St Louis, and gave me a tour as a thanks for helping him with the boxes and such. There's several things that have stuck in my memory from that tour. One was seeing their Cray. I forget which specific model it was. It was gray and mauve, and had the fountain with the logo on the unit that pumped the coolant. Monsanto had a dedicated computer room for it with glass walls so you could see it. The overall effect was to make a very strong impression that this was something very special. Another thing that stuck in my mind was seeing their bio labs. These were long concrete hallways dug halfway into the ground, I assume to make climate control easier. They had row upon row of corn plans under artificial light. These were the labs that developed roundup ready seed. I had no idea at the time the significance of what I was seeing or how contentious it would be now. Last thing I'll mention is when we were walking outside and he pointed out the separate building the CEO et all worked out of. It was literally a bunker with earthen birms and such around it. My grandpa bragged that it was built to be bombproof in case terrorists attacked the CEO. At the time I was somewhat mystified why anyone would bomb the CEO of a chemical company. I certainly understand why now. But anyhow, it was a cool experience and seeing that Cray probably helped inspire my interest in learning to program later. Edit: Random other thing I'll mention is an email exchange from a mailing list back in the late 90s that focused on APL style languages. Someone told their story about how back during Cray's glory days they worked in a lab where he did interactive APL programming on a Cray machine. I can only imagine what that must have felt like at the time, typing arcane terse syntax into a prompt that would execute them shockingly fast.