For an insight into that great man’s life, I highly recommend reading The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer by Charles J. Murray. I remember reading it back when I was in high-school so it’s more than twenty years old by now, but it’s still an amazing account of how those amazing people built those stunning machines.
I met Al Marshall, inventor of Token Ring Networking, some 20 years after. I had never heard of him until the guys I was working with ran into him at NetWorld, and we went to dinner. So he wasn’t one of my heroes. I also was more a fan of non-deterministic Ethernet.
We went to dinner and the conversation started around the Buzz at the show: Shell Oil was deploying a 500 megabit network in the Dallas Area. Like a half hour and a dozen topics later, Al just blurts out “they need that bandwidth to ship around the imaging data they collect from their surveys”. It came across like he had two brains, one that was engaged in the conversation, and the other figuring out what in the hell are these guys doing with all that bandwidth. Which was a lot in the day of 14.4k modems and T1 lines. After dinner when we parted ways with Al, our conversation was all about how we thought his brain might work.
The Q&A section is quite interesting. His knowledge of technical details is very impressive and you can feel the tremendous amount of respect that was bestowed on him by the audience.
A guy went out to eat in a New York restaurant. A couple came in, a pale white dude accompanied by the most beautiful black woman this guy had seen. They were seated close to him. It was immediately obvious to him that they were getting much better service than him - for instance they got their food almost immediately after ordering, while he was still waiting for his. So he started to heckle them.
Fast forward to a year later. David Bowie has died, and his picture is on the front cover of every magazine. This guy finally realizes who it was he'd been heckling.
Killed by a drunk driver in 1996 just as he was starting to develop his version of a massively parallel machine. Friggin irresponsible people ruin the world.
I was part of a small group of students from the University of Minnesota who were invited to the Cray plant in Chippewa Falls WI. The highlight was a visit with him in his office which didn't last long. He was very gracious. I don't remember much of what he said, except for the pumpkin. He pointed to a pumpkin on his desk and proclaimed that it was the Cray-3. His daughter had grown it in the garden, and knowing he was already working on a Cray-2 project decided that it should be called the Cray-3.
To give you an idea of when this was, I think they were just finishing the final tests of serial #5 of the Cray-1. They were very proud of the cooling system and invited us to touch the panels.
For an insight into that great man’s life, I highly recommend reading The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer by Charles J. Murray. I remember reading it back when I was in high-school so it’s more than twenty years old by now, but it’s still an amazing account of how those amazing people built those stunning machines.