My father was a personnel manager for CDC in the 70's. He started in Minnesota and then moved to California when they built their facility in La Jolla. In 1973 when my father was working on his PhD he would go to the office on weekends to run punch cards through the computer for statistical analysis of manager self-assessments. I remember playing tic-tac-toe on the console with a guy while my dad was running those punch cards. That guy was Seymour Cray.

I worked for a company that partnered with Cray Research to distribute their UniChem quantum mechanics software. While we were at their HQ, we saw a machine (I think it was a C90) in the process of construction and one of our scientists said something like "Oh, I see you changed the color" because it was a different color than the C90 he'd used in grad school. The response was "For thirty million dollars we'll paint it whatever color the buyer wants."

Cray certainly made a name for himself. Maybe it's an age thing, I'm in my 50's, but Cray machines were almost like mythological creatures. The guy really had an enormous impact.

Cray found it funny that Apple used his machines to create the Macs while he used the Macs to make his super computers 😆 Jobs and Cray both made jokes about it 😆

The original 'Tron' movie graphics were done using special CRT-based film scanners and recorders. They were connected to a Cray I/O processor with then-unheard-of 100 megabytes of RAM. The graphics were computed using the Cray computer, then recorded back to film. I had the privilege of working on the scanners/recorders many years later when they were upgraded with more RAM and HiPPI 100 MB/sec. I/O interfaces.

It's unbelievable to me how much those early days of ERA sound like modern IT and the tech industry. Over budget projects, having to raise venture capital, "meme stock"ing yourself to the every-man, Cray acting like a "veteran engineer" straight out of college, pivoting, mergers... it's never stops with this story and it's no different today.

I love the detail in this video. It reminds me of a story I heard at Ohio Supercomputer Center! In 1987 OSC got a Cray X-MP/24. In 1989 they replaced it with a Cray Y-MP8/864. Both machines had eight stacked processor boards submerged in Fluorinert and each required an outboard Heat Exchanger Unit. They made a lot of heat. The parking lot of the Supercomputer Center had a LOT of air conditioning compressor units in it. But they weren't exactly tidy. Some of them were pretty crooked. Because when they had done the changeover to the Y-MP8, they didn't want any downtime. They had the X-MP and Y-MP both online for awhile. They said the parking lot looked weird because the asphalt had actually melted and got all gooey when both Crays were running. The storage situation for supercomputers was weird. You had these fast machines, but they were hooked into '80s storage. OSC had hard drives that looked like rows of industrial washer/dryers. They had room-sized reel-to-reel tape storage jukebox with a robot arm to retrieve tapes! In 1992 I think OSC had just taken out the robot arm and put in a 1.2TB storage system which required an additional Cray Y-MP 2E to manage storage. Supercomputers just kinda morphed into clusters. There was sorta a mental turning point for everybody when Toy Story came out in 1995 and everybody knew it was made on a render farm of 100+ SPARCstations. It made Crays seem like old news. The last Cray they had at OSC I think was the Cray T3E-600/LC they got in 1997 which itself was running 136 DEC Alpha chips. A little more random backstory... I grew up in rural Ohio. In 1987 Ohio State University started Ohio Supercomputer Center with a lot of state funding. Every university had some access, and they sold time to businesses. I got a Commodore 64 for my 8th birthday and really lived/breathed computers. In 1991 I was 15 and I was basically the only computer nerd in Springfield, Ohio. I did weird things like begging my parents for nothing but a Turbo Pascal 5.5 compiler for my 386SX/16 for Christmas. This guy Brian Fargo made a lot of late '80s video games and I wrote him asking how I could make video games and he actually wrote back! I filled out an application to go to the Supercomputer Center's "Summer Institute" for high school kids. One question asked you to make a program which found all numbers which were both prime and fibonacci numbers up to 1000. Pick any language. It was the only programming question! It seemed too easy, so I thought I should do something clever. Most people knew a little BASIC at best. I wrote a super-short recursive Pascal function which counted Fibonacci numbers up to 1000 then fell out of recursion checking if they were prime. I was one of the 14 kids accepted. When I got there the next summer I just wanted to know how they graded that question! So I finally found the director Al Stutz and asked, and he said I was actually the only one who answered it correctly LOL! The summer of 1992 was a weird time. People didn't have the Internet. 14.4k modems were a new thing. There were a few BBS-es in Dayton, Ohio I could call. Everything else would be long distance. Prodigy and AOL existed, but they were just basically chatrooms and email. They weren't connected to the Internet. Because the Internet was just .gov and .mil and .edu sites. There wasn't much to do. At OSC in 1992, though, they had a lot of machines hooked up to the Internet. They even had a ton of NeXT cubes! And Steve Jobs actually came to OSC to talk about them! And OSC had a fat fibre connection! But the Internet had really barely even progressed past being DARPANET. The only thing to really do on the Internet was look for pirated games or soft-core porn. There wasn't much of any WWW. You just kinda had to know the address of something. But if you did, nothing had much security. You could just FTP to wuarchive.wustl.edu and browse everything that nerds had decided to share on the network. College FTP servers were mostly scans of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The newest game was Wolfenstein 3D. The only network game was NetHack. Gaming didn't get big till Duke Nukem 3D and then Quake and WarCraft 2. The Internet became a lot more interesting after I started pirating PSX games and playing Quake. Anyway, I love that this video has meaningful illustrations instead of just a buncha nearly-irrelevant stock photos.

This was a fantastic presentation! Well done! As an aging computer nerd that came of age in the 90's, Cray still had a whole mystique around them even going into 2K. The legend was so strong it took a long time for people to forget the name. Them and Silicon Graphics.

Fun fact. They’re still making supercomputers to this day in Chippewa Falls. They were eventually bought out by HP Enterprises couple years back, but my brother works there and the company is still involved with Los Alamos too.

With a C130 at the Allied Air Base in France in 1945 it seems the Crays helped pioneer some Skynet style temporal devices too.

I used these a bit. In 1971 and 1982 I used a CDC 6400 at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tuscon. Fast machine with six peripheral processors, but its memory was very small. A lot of software ran on FORTH, which is unquely miserly in use of RAM. In 1987 I used a Cray 1 (or X-MP?) at the University of Toronto, by this time remotely via Internet. The funny thing is that these days a $10 Raspberry Pi outperforms these machines (at least for pure scalar number-crunching). Massive superscalar paralellism has taken over, with GPUs adding more punch yet. But the CDC and Cray machines had a certain magic for scientists in the day.

I remember Cray being synonymous with supercomputing, even into the '90s. You couldn't mention one without the other also being considered. If I remember correctly, the movie The Last Star Fighter, a pioneer in cinematic CGI, used a Cray X-MP as part of its graphics pipeline.

I grew up in Livermore, and worked at Sandia Livermore in the 1980s and 1990s. Our Cray's (X-MP and Y-MP) were giant money pits for the users. I remember the computing department having utter fits when other departments started getting desktop workstations like the first Sun SPARCstations and Silicon Graphics machines. I spent a full year porting all of the programs we had on the Crays to those machines so we could save huge amounts of case money. While the engineering and materials departments were moving to these small, fast machines the computing department was buying odd ball machines like Stardent (or the earlier versions from Ardent and Stellar) and continued to push for shared computing platforms.

This one guy seems to have pioneered many computer fundamentals that we now take for granted.

I remember an old mythical rumor many, many years ago that a Cray system had *finished* an infinite loop in something like a week of continuous operation.

It is really shocking to consider how revolutionary the transistor really was. Especially when you consider how simple they are. They can make transistors now so small they are made with just a small handful of molecules.

Absolutely fantastic work, extremely well presented! I am so glad the algorithm brought this to me, and I hope this video brings you a huge number of well deserved views and subs, you've certainly earned mine!

Even though the philosophies of single supercomputers lost to the distributed computers of today. One thing is for certain... The Cray computers looked just damn cool. :D

This was a bit of a trip down memory lane, I operated a couple of Crays back in the 80's, a Cray-1, then a Cray X-MP. The Cray-1 was rumoured to be #1 which Cray were installing in a customers site while 'their' machine was being built.

I was introduced to computers in college, circa 1975. Some kind of mainframe in the basement of a building; punch cards, teletype card punchers, etc. I remained a computer nerd throughout my career(s) - about 40 years. Pretty much all along the way, when the name "CRAY" was mentioned it was almost as if you could hear the "Ahhhhh!" soundbite of 'angels singing' used in movies and on TV. 😄

Ah, the Cray Supercomputer, I can hardly wait to get a Cray emulator on my Raspberry Pi.

Until now I never really understood how pipelining and superscalar execution worked.

I worked for Cray Research, Inc. for about 10 (1983-1993) years on the IBM VM Station and then on porting various versions of UNIX to UNICOS. It was a GREAT company; I still have very fond memories. Just FYI: One issue with the Cray 2 was the burning of the fluorocarbon (e.g., a short causing an arcing). The product would become poisonous, requiring immediate venting and complete draining and discarding of all coolant.

No mention of Cray's attempt to achieve wafer lever circuits... which were never successful. Second digital computer I programmed was a CDC 3300. Cost $1M; filled a room; not as powerful as my phone. My first computer was an IBM 1620. Size of a desk. Took me two weeks to multiply two numbers using machine language... in 1964. Was a Junior in Electrical Engineering and saw no chance of computers affecting my career. Have programmed continuously since 1968. Even did Analog computer in 1966. Lots of changes. Created a language I still prefer over all others... and am the worlds best, and only, programmer, using it.

Probably, one of the best videos i've watched on UKposts for ages... Fantastic, Kudos Archie. I've been interested in Cray for many years. this was a great representation..!

My dad worked at Control Data in the 60s and 70s and was neck deep in all of this. Thank you for doing this it was really great. I have a feeling it's going to make my dad's day! He worked at that place at 50th and Park I remember him mentioning that. They were he lived over on W. Calhoun Parkway. We always heard about this mythical figure named Seymour Cray no I kind of have an idea who he was.

Seymour Cray is a really likable character. I like the combination of technical genius and an unfortunate tendency to bankrupt companies by being incredibly bleeding edge. Still he invented the so much modern computing - the superscalar, pipelined, RISC machines he pioneered are really the guts of any modern CPU. And there's something fundamentally charming about the way he could see the future before everyone else and desperately wanted to get their first.

Superscalar execution was first used in 80960 processors from intel in 1988. The Pentium team copied the technique along with some of the 960 parts , like the floating point unit. I was on that team. The Cray designs were breakthroughs and we followed the evolution of computer architecture from them and others to create an Out-of-Order design with Speculative Execution, branch prediction, register renaming and many other mechanisms that allowed instruction execution speedups. These were done in the Pentium Pro design, which was not at all similar to the original Pentium designs. We were targetting Cray level numerical performance as a goal and achieved it in the late 1990's only to surpass it with much more parallelism in both multiprocessing and advanced superscalar designs. These designs of the 1990's are still the root of current microprocessors. Advances from them have addressed other bottlenecks in the system to incorporate faster memory interfaces along with multilevel caching for increasingly higher performance as silicon technology also advanced. Many make the mistake in assuming that just the process technology increased the capability of new processors when it has actually been the combination of computer microarchitecture along with silicon advances that have led us to today. Thanks for the walk down memory lane...:)

SuperScale is when two are more instructions were dispatched at the same clock tick. The CDC 6600 was scaler as it only issue or dispatch only one instruction at a time. The multifunction units which allow parallel execution of instructions. I have programmed on the CDC 6600, the CDC 6400, and the CDC 7600. None of Cray's computers were SuperScalar. In the CDC 7600 the function units were pipeline where multiple instruction may be executing in the function unit. See the Thornton - The Design of the a Computer. The CDC 6600.

Excellent work! I worked at Cray from 1981 - 1995 (in fact, my younger brother still works for the current incarnation of Cray - HPE) and spent a lot of time optimizing software to take advantage of the Cray architecture, sometimes at the assembly language level. The one thing that often struck me was how well balanced the entire system was, since just when you started to exhaust one system resource, such as the number of available vector registers, it turned out you were also close to other system limits, such as memory bandwidth and available scalar registers. It was an amazing series of machines!

I thoroughly recommend the book The Supermen as an accompaniment to this video. It covers this story in even more detail. Seymour Cray and his band of merry men were genii.

I was hired out of school to work as a sys-admin on the ETA-10P, a CDC subsidiary spawned to compete with Cray. After ETA went bust, I worked as a junior sys-admin on a Cray X-MP before working with NEC SX vector supercomputers throughout the 90's. They went CMOS and fought off the microprocessors for a decade before distributed memory machines took over. lots of room for future videos there. I had no idea how the direct the connection to the military was in founding ERA, Remington-Rand, Sperry, and CDC. You did an excellent job digging this stuff up. fwiw, slight issue with airplanes used. When discussing WW2, you used a C-130, which first flew in 1954. when discussing airlines in the 1950's you used jet models which first flew in the 1960's... slight anachronisms. really enjoyed the video.

It’s pretty interesting how modern GPUs use many of the same ideas like superscalar processing with many pipelines doing vector processing. Enjoyed the video, seems very well researched.

How and why the fuck does this only have 150 views? The level of quality matches that of many channels with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of subscribers. I know it was only released 2 hours ago (at the time of writing), but I still think it deserves way more views.

Ever since Tron came out in 1982, which used a Cray machine, I have always liked the Cray story. This video really explained everything about how the machines came into existence.

A brilliant piece of work. The only thing you left out was the Cray inspired Sun CS6400 which lead directly to the E10k and onwards, perhaps the most important computer ever produced. I had the pleasure to work with the 6400 and of course all the Sun machines

I want one of these deep dives into Honeywell computers. Finding history on some of those is tough. This was well done, I enjoyed it.

During my sophomore year at Livermore High School in 1972, I was in a small fortran programming class. Once a week we were driven down to the CDC office just outside the Lab to run our small jobs on the 6600. We got to wander in the control room and load our little decks onto the card reader. I was in total awe of the large format pen plotter where the head was held upright and moved electromagnetically; no x-y mechanical arms. While I was in grad school at CSU, they upgraded their mainframe to a CDC Cyber 205, which is apparently related to the Star 100. It had a small microwave transmitter/receiver connection from one end of the system to the other, perhaps 15 - 20 ft or so. Mind boggling technology at the time. One of my colleagues became the guy who 'vectorized' other students programs to take advantage of the speed gains. Our professor was invited to Livermore to spend time on the Cray-1 there and soon after I actually got to see a Cray-1 during a tour at the National Bureau of Standards office in Boulder. I really enjoyed this video, it is informative, well constructed, and gave a great backstory to my fortunate little experiences with this technology.

Found this through a news letter to old CDC graduates. Brought back memories for me of many of the early players. A wonderful introduction of the importance of the labs and Sid Fernbach to early computing. LRL Livermore (Sid Fernbach) bought the first CDC 3600, the first CDC 6600, the first CDC 7600 and the first CDC Star 100. Seymour Cray was unique in the computer industry: First Transistor computer, first RISC, first multi functional unit design, first instruction stack, then pipeline, first short vector approach, and always the most aggressive packaging and his ability to completely stop one design approach and go to a new one. Congratulations on a well done journey from concepts in the 50's to the last super computers of the early 90's. I enjoyed 29 years on that journey until 1989.

I wasn't aware of a lot of the early UNIVAC history you relate here! In 1981 I was working on a UNIVAC 1100/42 (2 CAUs and 2 IOAUs along with an SPU). We had some really fast (for the day) fixed-head disk that we usually booted from, but we also had a FASTRAND II* drum(!) that we also could boot from. This was at Offutt AFB in Building 501 (the underground command post); I was a computer operator there and our system produced (via a Ford Philco(!) device occupying a couple of racks) vector graphics depicting force readiness and other such data for the people two floors further underground than I was. On the remote chance anyone is familiar, ADDO was our office symbol. I also had passing occasion to program on a CDC Cyber 7600, as well as operating Honeywell Level 62 and Burroughs A2 systems. --- * these had a failure mode that involved throwing the spinning drum through walls. I'm glad I didn't know that then!

I worked for Cray Research 1987 to 1992. A great company whose fate was sealed by massively parallel computing and chip integration. It was an amazingly organized enterprise and profitable until it get some competition from other technologies. What an adventure that was.

Worked at CRI from 1987-1993. Learned a lot, it was like doing post grad work once I started working in the development division. Spent time on Cray-2. Worked on a CALMA system to learn circuit layout on gate array chips. Went on to learn circuit design and layout using Cadence software tools. Running SPICE simulations using software from Meta-software compiled on a 8cpu Cray II meant that we could simulate logic circuits faster than anyone in the industry. Other parts of the company were using logic synthesis programs to design and run emulations for whole systems allowing next generation designs. I met extremely talented and dedicated professionals that inspired me. I left Cray shortly after the government announced that budget cuts for Super Computer purchases and apparently there was not enough money from commercial sales. Next gen machines which were on the minds at CRI used thousands of processors in a parallel processing system. Indeed all supers today are massively parallel machines.

This is an easy-to-understand video with very easy-to-understand CG and the purpose for which they are needed. It is also very important that the names of the scientists involved appear. Thanks for the update to UKposts.

I remember my University (USP in Brazil) was about to buy a supercomputer, three companies went to make presentations (for all University staff and students to see) of their machines: IBM with its 3090 with vector processors, that required basically a building made for it, CDC with its ETA 10 that could be liquid nitrogen refrigerated and was easily installed on the same building a traditional mainframe could and Cray (I didn't saw Cray's presentation). The balance was pending to CDC ETA 10, and then IBM offered the 3090 for free! Yeah! At the end I don't know what happened but I am pretty sure the University didn't bought any of those (I may be wrong though). I think (my theory) the supercomputer project was scraped and time was borrowed or purchased from other nearby entities that had powerful computers (some had 3090's like Petrobras and others ETA 10's I don't remember if it was INPE or ITA that had one) without the hassle of maintaining the physical machine.

I worked for Cray in the 80s and 90s. It was great hearing details about the beginnings of the company and familiar names.

Awesome video. This is an area of computing that isn't talked about that often, but it's extremely important.

Excellent documentary and amazing voice over. The accent is unique, yet pronunciation is consistent and not in the least bit annoying. I could listen to this content for days.

Stanislaw Ulam developed the hydrogen bomb with out massive 1 or 2 d computer model and big computer: Stanisław Ulam, the Polish physicist on the Manhattan Project, invented the Monte-Carlo method to predict fusion reactions for various designs of the hydrogen bomb. Ulam integrated the Monte-Carlo process to follow the laws of nuclear physics in generating neutron fluxes, x-rays, and daughter products. He accounted for the inherent statistical fluctuations in neutron chain reactions using only the upper and lower bounds of probabilities for each step. Ulam assigned UCLs and LCLs with 95 percent upper and lower probabilities for each reaction step for each hydrogen bomb configuration. He found that he could quickly predict whether a given design worked. He soon determined that Edward Teller's Spark Plug design would never work. Ulam then designed the fusion device that would work. Edward Teller would insist that Ulam was wrong in claiming that Teller's Spark Plug configuration would not work. Soon, however, Edward Teller would add a minor improvement and take full credit for Ulam's design. He would ignore Ulam's seminal contribution until much later. (Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, 1995, Richard Rhodes).

Incredible video! I always wondered about Cray Research, but never sought-out that info. I SO appreciate you serving-it-up as comprehensively as you did!

Excellent documentary. I really like the graphics and animation you added to tell the story. Thank you!

Great review! As someone who grew up through this development, it's fascinating to re-live all these milestones, left behind and forgotten...

Many thanks for this video - like most people I have only ever seen Cray computers in movies and magazines but there is something very cool about the look of them, and the fancy cooling systems. In the movie Sneakers Ben Kingsley is seen sitting on one while chatting.

I remember being in awe of the Cray-1's 80MHz clock speed at the start of the 1980s when I began using early microprocessors. This was a great overview of the general progression of high-end computing without delving into the technical details. I remember hearing that the Cray-1 used new ECL logic chips and that the power supply rectifiers were low voltage drop germanium to minimize heat production given the enormous currents that had to be supplied at low voltages to the machine's circuits. I also remember reading that the circular arrangement of the individual columns was to minimize and equalize propagation delays between units in the backplane interconnect wiring. And now, using many of the concepts Cray developed, look at the multiprocessor power you can buy relatively cheaply in a desktop box. I guess the definition of supercomputer would always be shifting to include only the newest and fastest machines. So far has it come in just a few decades and mostly thanks to the incredible advances in the compaction of the circuitry on silicon dies. In the 1980s, 1um fabrication technology was the newest thing in transistor shrinkage. Now, clock speeds in the multi-GHz range, tens of CPU cores per die, memory into the TeraByte region etc. Just mind-blowing. Seymour is forever a legend in my mind. Thanks for this utterly watchable video!

A thoroughly professional piece of work - research, illustrations, technical detail, and pace of delivery all very well judged. Congratulations!

As a very old expat Brit engineer who has spent his life in and out of computing, this has been a very interesting (and new to me) story. Of excess . . . Thanks for all your hard work. 😎

Univac wasn't the world's first commerical computer - that was LEO - Lyons Electronic Office.

Thank you! This was an amazing documentary about the history of the Cray supercomputers!

You put an incredible amount of work into this vid and we appreciate every minute of it 👍

To think the small machines we got today, to do the same things years ago required a room full huge machines. Back in the day hard drives were the size of clothes dryers. The discovery of semiconductor technology was a game changer.

I thought I knew a bit of history but not in this area. The tech and architecture he came up with in the 60s blew my mind. I got to see and sit on the little bench of a working X-MP at Global Weather at Offutt Air Force Base in I think 1992. My dad worked there on another system and he took me on a little tour of his area. It certainly wasn’t anything classified and there was never a security risk. They were going to be retiring it and did not long after (just a couple of years if I recall). When the video said there were only a little over 100 made, it made that memory that much more special.

surprisingly good video - subbed. I'm old enough to remember the cray computers... Silicon Graphics and SUNs heyday

Thank you! This video is spectacular. I was shocked when I saw how few subscribers you have! The production quality and content will get you a huge following soon. You got a new sub from me!

incredible video 👏👏 love the animations in this one

A video of this quality deserves a lot more than 12.5K views. I hope the UKposts algorithm bumps it up a bit in the recommendations queue

Wow my grandpa worked for Control Data and then Ceridian for nearly 50 years and I didn’t know too much about the history of the company. Thanks so much for making such an incredible video describing it all. I can’t wait to call him about this!!

Very good job on this video! The research, writing, narration animation and editing were flawless.

Thanks, very well done. I have been in the IT realm pretty much all my life. I grew up with kids whose parents worked at CDC, Cray, Honeywell and other companies. One of the things that has always amazed me is how fast things change and how slowly they develop. My brother went to MIT, and I remember playing a dog fight game on a 6"x6" green screen running on a PDP-4. The screen drew so slowly that the body of the plane., made up of dashes, would bend when going around a corner. This was in the lates 60's. Talking about the massively parallel designs for the later supercomputers reminded me of something my brother mentioned. Some of the large computers were running into problems with the speed of electricity (light in essence). They needed to build the computers in a way to shorten the length of wire connections. A nanosecond, is a very short amount of time, but, in terms of light speed, it is about a foot in length.

Thanks, I enjoyed that. I did work experience doing data entry & changing tapes in an IBM-360 clean room. It felt like a spaceship to me.

Well done! As a computer engineering grad in 1994, I didn't truly appreciate the history that underpinned the industry I love so much. I worked on SGI computers at the Canadian National Research Council in 1991/1992 and didn't realize they would go on to acquire Cray Research. Fascinating!

I worked for Cray Computer in Colorado Springs in the early 1990s. For two years. First year in assembly and wiring. Second year in the Gallium Arsenide chip productions. I could see the writing on the wall, I got a new job at a chip manufacturing plant literally across the street from Cray. The next week former colleagues called to tell me that the place was closed and shuttered. End of an era.

I really love how you tell your stories. Using 3D animations and stylized themes to present information is truly something different from what other content creators produces. Keep up the great production!

Hats off to Cray and his team!

Wow superb content and I loved the detail you presented. Fantastic, thank you all for producing this!

Wow! Great video! I honestly thought I would end up watching another video but after having watched this twice over now I can honestly say that this was very well made! Great job!

Very good video... I worked and still live in the silicon valley as a industrial HVAC tech, late 70's till a couple years ago. Our industry evolved right along with the computer and semiconductor industry's. It was quite a ride providing the environmental controls and cooling needs for these industry's. Worked on the facilities for almost every major brand. Thanks for doing the video !

I have been searching for this very type of documentary on this topic , thank you , nice work.

Well done! Just came across your channel and loved the content!

Great research, great video! thank you, really enjoyed it!

Excellent video. Thank you. I worked for CDC between 1975 and 1982, mostly in the IBM Plug Compatible Market (PCM) arena, but had occasion to interact with the CDC Cyber mainframe and then Cray operation. The people I worked with were open-minded, free spirited and driven to succeed. I consider Bill Norris to be the Elon Musk of his era. On one occasion, I was at the Arden Hills facility when a guy in a plaid shirt offered to explain how a 7600 that was in final checkout functioned. He demonstrated how several 'modules' could be physically removed while other engineers continued to test the system performance without it slowing or even crashing. I discovered the engineer in the plaid shirt was Seymour. A nice bloke. One thing that was overlooked that contributed to Cray setting up shop 'over the border' was the parallel development of the CDC STAR100, STAR in this case referring to the STring-ARay architecture. The STAR100 was not a Cray project but that of Jim Thornton, a one time assistant to Seymour. That machine development also ran long, but several were built and installed at the Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. Again, thank you. You should write a book about CDC. One is sorely needed. BTW, the first computer I operated and programmed was a British EMIDEC 1100, already quite old, in 1965. Look it up. It was a true generation 1 system. We ran a plastics facility that employed 7000 people, handled payroll, chemical simulation, sales and such, with a 8k 36 bit word machine, without disc drives. Just 4 35mm sprocket feed tape decks and an 8k drum. The CPU used two 1k Williams tube memories. Fun times.

Truly outstanding presentation. Thank you. Thank you. I am planning to share it with my students in the solid state devices course I teach in the spring. I look forward to more such presentations from you.

in the 70ies and 80ies I worked for a machine shop in Hopkins, Mn making spindles for the disc drives for those computers. These things were massive as a 5 mg memory disc was the size of a record album. we made them by the thousands for control data and MPI.

When reading the comments ... I feel they double the brilliant(!) content of the vid with the same qualitiy, background stories, personel expieriences and so on. I love that. And to emphasis: No gaming world and no LLMs without Cray's vetorization.

Amazing compilation of facts. Thanks

Thanks very interesting, I was a field service engineer maintaining CDC6600s , then moved on to DEC VAXs and DECsystems 20s.

40:25 , the tractor outside Cray Research was a nice touch.

Halt and catch fire. Great PC adventure series.

You're back uploading - great to see !!

Hi, an excellent video. The “Das Deutsche Museum” in Munich has a Gray supercomputer on display. A insider told me that some parts of it are stored in a safe and are still labeled “Top secret”. And every year the safe is checked if all parts are still there…

I remember seeing my first Cray computer(s) in the late 80s/early 90s. The Cray 1 was decommissioned and used in the foyer of the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne (Australia). When you went inside their datacentres the YMP was proudly on display from a glass wall of a meeting room. It looked like a piece of art amongst the more utilitarian racks and boxes of the equipment that we were all used to seeing. Talking about Univac though, what people don’t realise is how much of the old machines you used to actually see working. I worked on a pair of Univac 418s that looked great when running. The whole front of the machine had lights for the registers (that you needed to manually manipulate to boot the system). The result was a constantly flickering front panel when running. It used hand wound magnetic core memory and took up 2 rooms. They were used to reformat telegram messages coming into and out of Australia. This was in the early 80s and the original FastRand magnetic drum storage was getting too difficult to repair. Re-writing the code used on the 418s and replacing them wasn’t deemed cost effective. So many moving parts! What was done was to use PDP-11s to emulate the drum storage and keep the 418s happy, but use the (at the time) much more reliable (cough) removable pack disk drives. The whole setup kept a bunch of us busy working shifts to make sure that we had a running machine at all times with each 418 being the fall-back. Most common failure were the old transistors that were starting to go bad, or a head crash in the disk drives that required a complete strip down and rebuild in our little clean room.

Nicely done! Very good mix of history and technical details. Surprisingly informative. Good job, thanks!

youve earned a new subscriber, wow, loved the graphics, loved the infor and loved the narration. this is cool

Fascinating. Many thanks for all the hard work that's obviously gone into this.

that was an awesome video, thanks for making

Can't wait to watch this! Yesssss!

Cray was one of our customers and I got to visit their factory. I have never been so cold in my life. It was -20F outside. The factory was not all that impressive. Looked more like a start-up than a supercomputer manufacturer. They used to buy electrostatic printers from us as they were the fastest available at the time and their diagnostics apparently dumped a lot of paper to pour over. There's one in the computer museum in Silicon Valley that you can see. The Cray vs Amdahl wars were legendary.

My dad got a job at an oil refinery in California, once his enlistment in the Air Force ended in 1968. He would have been part of the first class of technicians who were training to run the refinery, but when the company founded out what he had done for the Airforce (land surveying and writing blue prints, they had him working in in that part of the construction project before going into the second class of technician trainees. He ended up working the rest of his career for this refinery, which was the first computer controlled refinery in the United States and just the second to go on-line in the world. The computer was huge, in 1968 the computer took up two floors, each 100 feet by 100 feet. Dad would often work in the control room which I got to see many many times as I was growing up, at first when I went with mom to pick him up from work, then later on my own, after I got my driver's license when I was asked to pick dad up myself. Of course I was never allowed to touch anything, but it was very cool to go and see. Thousands of buttons, dials, gages and display screens. It looked very much like I imagined the control room of a spaceship might look. Not long before dad retired I was visiting when mom asked me to go pick up dad from work. I was shocked by some of the changes I saw in the control room. It still looked more or less the same with all the butts dials and switches but the computer room was very different. Instead of a huge room filled with rows and rows of large computer banks, it was now a large, nearly empty room with one tiny box inside, smaller than the average sized refrigerator. That was the entire computer that ran the entire refinery. In fact, it was 2 computers. One primary and one back up. That is how much computers had shrunk in the 25 years my dad worked there. And that was 25 years ago! I would not be surprised if I went there and saw a smartphone sitting on the floor of that 2 story 2000 square foot space.

It's craazy that a modern PC is faster than all of the supercomputers in this video combined.

In the late 80's a friend who worked for Cray invited me to "family day" to at Laurence Livermore Labs. While there we visited the Cray room. If I remember correctly there was a row of 8 Cray 1's and a Cray X-MP. There also was a single Cray 2. The liquid tank of the Cray 2 was transparent and one could see bubbles emerging from the boards. As it was family day, some children were putting finger prints all over it. Fast forward to around 2010, I took a class of students to see the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara. They had a Cray 1, a Cray 2 and the Cray 3. I suspect these were donated by LLL. The three was by comparision tiny, a bit bigger than a toaster covered by ribbon cables.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

My introduction to computers began in the U.S, Navy in 1962 as an Electronics Technician (ET) assigned to on of the first three ships to have digital computers aboard them. The ship had so much prototype equipment besides the two UNIVAC AN-USQ20 all transistor computers that we had civilian visitors on board almost continuously when we operated on the eastern side of Hawaii in the Pacific ocean. Among those were some who were familiar with Seymour Cray and I was told that our computer had had input from him. This fact confused me when much later in life I read about the timelines you detail here. Thank you for the information about his being allowed to work independently while at Control Data. The AN-USQ-20 was not a supercomputer, but it was amazingly good for its very small size at that time. We used a vacuum tube during our on shore training as an emulator. Of course the U about the size of a double door refrigerator, (air cooled by an integrated chilled water heat exchanger, by the way) it had less computing power than my iphone.