Somewhere in the recesses of my memory there lives a small photograph, from one of the many magazines that fed my young interests in science and electronics – it was probably Popular Science. In my mind I see a man standing before a large machine. The man looks awkward; he clearly didn’t want to pose for the magazine photographer. The machine behind him was an amazing computer, its insides a riot of wires all of the same color; the accompanying text told me each piece was cut to a precise length so that signals could be synchronized to arrive at their destinations at exactly the right time.

My young mind was agog that a machine could be so precisely timed that a few centimeters could make a difference to a signal propagating at the speed of light. As a result, I never forgot the name of the man in the photo – Seymour Cray, the creator of the supercomputer. The machine was his iconic Cray-1, the fastest scientific computer in the world for years, which would go on to design nuclear weapons, model crashes to make cars safer, and help predict the weather.

Very few people get to have their name attached so firmly to a product, let alone have it become a registered trademark. The name Cray became synonymous with performance computing, but Seymour Cray contributed so much more to the computing industry than just the company that bears his name that it’s worth taking a look at his life, and how his machines created the future.

Inventing an Industry

The small city of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin would be both the birthplace of Seymour Cray and the place that would hold him and give him roots. From the day he was born in 1925, Chippewa Falls was his place. His father, a civil engineer, encouraged his obvious early interest in the technical world, with radio playing a central role in his interests.

Seymour’s first taste of the world outside Chippewa Falls came courtesy of the US Army in 1943. Reluctant to enlist, he ended up in the infantry and saw action in both the European and Pacific theaters. The Army found little use for his electrical talents in Europe beyond assigning him to a signals unit and having him tote field radios around Germany, but in the Philipines he was put to work on cryptographic analysis of Japanese codes, which at least harnessed some of his considerable mathematical powers.

With the end of the war, Seymour completed his degree in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, and stayed on for a Master’s in applied mathematics. With little idea what to do next, he took a professor’s advice to apply at a place called Engineering Research Associates in St. Paul, Minnesota.

ERA was one of the first companies created specifically to build computers. Formed during the war to concentrate on code-breaking gear for the US Navy, the firm was kept afloat by …read more

Source:: Hackaday