Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers

On Wed, 21 May 2025 11:21:25 +0300, Michael S wrote:

W.r.t. CDC 6600 Wikipedia article does not state an exact date of the
1st shipment at all, just saying that it was in 1965.

Cooling was a vicious problem in the early units. Charles J Murray’s “The
Supermen” says (page 107) that “the Livermore lab had expected a 6600 in
February 1964, but didn’t receive one until August”. So some units were
shipping in 1964. It says “it took until early 1965 before Control Data
engineers finally exorcised all of the 6600’s demons”.

From that book’s title, you would assume it’s not just about Seymour Cray.
In fact he’s the main figure, and very fawning on him it is, too. It is
less complimentary towards the other main “superman”, Steve Chen, who was
the one who oversaw the development of the Cray-X/MP and Cray-Y/MP, which
were backward-compatible successors to the Cray-1, while Seymour himself
went off to (try to) come up with the Cray-2, Cray-3 and Cray-4.