EricBall's Tech Projects - Cray-1

RSS Bot · May 21, 2010

Even though I didn't get into computers until several years after the Cray-1 first came to market, it was still a legendary computer.

Just the look and shape of it was awe inspiring; looking like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey (or any other SF film). No simple box, but a C shaped tower with a "love seat". Then you learned that "love seat" was the refrigeration system - it was cooled with Freon - how cool was that? A computer that got so hot it needed a cooling system. (Which actually wasn't that uncommon for large systems of the time. But when your point of reference is a fanless home computer....)

The actual design of the Cray-1 is interesting. Seymour Cray took the knowledge he gained working on the CDC supercomputers and built something very advanced.

One major design change he made was adding a huge number of registers for temporary storage, including vectors. Up to that point vector processors processed data stored in main memory. ...

http://www.atariage.com/forums/blog/7/entry-7076-cray-1/