3 ms·
I had the opportunity to use a Cray Y-MP 2E at university in the early 90s. At the time there were strict export restrictions, so I had to get a special approva
by guiambros 12y ago
I had the opportunity to use a Cray Y-MP 2E at university in the early 90s. At the time there were strict export restrictions, so I had to get a special approval from the U.S. Government (this was in Brazil).
It was a beautiful machine. The C-shaped purple machine was impressive, and the refrigeration system took most the space. And we had some nice SGI Indigo as front-end workstations, so you could optimize your (Forth) code before moving to UNICOS - the Unix flavor used by Cray.
In hindsight, it's ironic to think about all the paranoia and secrecy - for just 666 Megaflops. My not-so-new Core i7 has 150,000+ Mflops, not counting the GPU.
- seanp2k2 12y agoAhh yes, modern computers put these older systems to shame in some regards, but what did the typical desktop have back then? There's a person out there who made a 1/10th scale cycle-accurate Cray-1A...which is truly pretty cray http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-numbotron/ http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-numbotron/
- martin1b 12y agoIf we say that about the Cray 2 30 years later, interesting to think what they will say about the cloud in 30 years.
- kjs3 12y agoI'm always annoyed at the "my shiny new desktop is faster than that old Cray". A better comparison would be "how fast a computer can you buy for 2m 1990 dollars adjusted for inflation?". That's more than US$3.7m; that's a lot of computer. I got to use a Y-MP48 in the old days. Good times.