"He [Seymour Cray] is the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."
Larry L. Smarr, physicist
Imagine if you could revolutionize the design of computers and leave the competition standing; U.S. inventor Seymour Cray (1925-1996) made a habit of doing just that. In 1972, with a long history of extending the reach of computer technology already behind him, Cray set up the Cray Research company to concentrate on building a powerful computer. His design for the Cray 1 was the first major commercial success in supercomputing. It was essentially a giant microprocessor capable of completing 133 million floating-point operations per second with an 8- megabyte main memory The secret to its immense speed was Cray's own vector register technology and its revolutionary "C" shape, which meant its integrated circuits could be packed together as tightly as possible. It produced an immense amount of heat and it needed a complex Freon-based cooling system to prevent it from melting.
The Cray 2, introduced in 1985, was six to twelve times faster, with ten times the memory, Cray's supercomputers have been of inestimable value to science and have been used to predict the weather, design airplanes, explore for oil, and even provide computer simulations of nuclear tests.
