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I was part of a group from the University of Minnesota who took a road trip to the Cray plant in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. I don't remember the year, but it w

by mark-r 1y ago

I was part of a group from the University of Minnesota who took a road trip to the Cray plant in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. I don't remember the year, but it was early - they were doing final tests on serial #5 of the Cray-1. My expectation prior to the trip is that the closest we would get to the computer was the other side of a glass window, but we got up close and personal. We were invited to touch the panels separating the inside and outside, they were very proud of their cooling system. One small trip into the inside could have caused millions of dollars of damage to the wire nest. We briefly met the great man himself in his office. I don't remember much of what he said that day, except for the story of the pumpkin on his desk. His daughter had grown it, and knew he was building the Cray-1 and starting the design of the Cray-2. So she called the pumpkin the Cray-3.

theideaofcoffee 1y ago
I was around there quite a while after Cray himself passed away, but even then, people who were part of the OG Cray Research, even a single-digit handful that started at Control Data and followed all of the acquisitions that spent their life at that institution, still spoke about him with absolute reverence. Until they moved offices, his portrait hung in one of the main conference rooms in the St Paul office and I could tell his ghost had a profound effect, to visitors and employees alike. I am supremely envious of you having been able to speak with him, was one of the few people in tech that I looked up to back then. The original Chippewa facility (1050 Lowater) is something else. Room after room of systems in various states of completion, test fixtures, pallet after pallet of CPUs and ram, in the time of the massively-parallel systems, and all other parts of the machines themselves ready for assembly. Test equipment dotting every corner during bringup of parts of a new architecture. One room held customer engineering and replicas of legacy systems still chugging away in case a high-profile customer needed assistance. I believe it was an X1 reserved for a petroleum company. And yes, being able to walk around and actually touch a $150 million system running pre-delivery acceptance tests that would have been shipped out a few weeks later and installed at a customer site was unreal, not to mention having committed software that would have been running on that same system. Just a place like no other and I don't think it will ever be duplicated. I still kick myself for leaving and wasting untold amounts of time at shitty, mind-numbing, software startups that went nowhere and had comparatively zero, inching toward negative, impact on anything in the world.

by mark-r 1y ago

theideaofcoffee 1y ago

I was around there quite a while after Cray himself passed away, but even then, people who were part of the OG Cray Research, even a single-digit handful that started at Control Data and followed all of the acquisitions that spent their life at that institution, still spoke about him with absolute reverence. Until they moved offices, his portrait hung in one of the main conference rooms in the St Paul office and I could tell his ghost had a profound effect, to visitors and employees alike. I am supremely envious of you having been able to speak with him, was one of the few people in tech that I looked up to back then. The original Chippewa facility (1050 Lowater) is something else. Room after room of systems in various states of completion, test fixtures, pallet after pallet of CPUs and ram, in the time of the massively-parallel systems, and all other parts of the machines themselves ready for assembly. Test equipment dotting every corner during bringup of parts of a new architecture. One room held customer engineering and replicas of legacy systems still chugging away in case a high-profile customer needed assistance. I believe it was an X1 reserved for a petroleum company. And yes, being able to walk around and actually touch a $150 million system running pre-delivery acceptance tests that would have been shipped out a few weeks later and installed at a customer site was unreal, not to mention having committed software that would have been running on that same system. Just a place like no other and I don't think it will ever be duplicated. I still kick myself for leaving and wasting untold amounts of time at shitty, mind-numbing, software startups that went nowhere and had comparatively zero, inching toward negative, impact on anything in the world.