Seymour Cray

[3] Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them.As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals.[6] Cray graduated from Chippewa Falls High School in 1943 before being drafted for World War II as a radio operator.He first worked on the design of an upgraded version (the CDC 3000 series), but company management wanted these machines targeted toward "business and commercial" data processing for average customers.Although in terms of hardware the 6600 was not on the leading edge,[citation needed] Cray invested considerable effort into the design of the machine in an attempt to enable it to run as fast as possible.He did this by replacing I/O interrupts with a polled request issued by one of ten so-called peripheral processors, which were built-in mini-computers that did all transfers in and out of the 6600's central memory.[15] In 1963, in a Business Week article announcing the CDC 6600, Seymour Cray clearly expressed an idea that is often misattributed to Herb Grosch as so-called Grosch's law: Computers should obey a square law — when the price doubles, you should get at least four times as much speed.During this period Cray had become increasingly annoyed at what he saw as interference from CDC management.Part of the reason for the move may also have to do with Cray's worries about an impending nuclear war, which he felt made the Twin Cities a serious safety concern.After the 6600 shipped, the successor CDC 7600 system was the next product to be developed in Chippewa Falls, offering peak computational speeds of ten times the 6600.[18] The split was fairly amicable, and when he started Cray Research in a new laboratory on the same Chippewa property a year later, Norris invested $250,000 in start-up money.When the President in charge of financing traveled to Wall Street to look for seed money, he was surprised to find that Cray's reputation was very well known.Far from struggling for some role to play in the market, the financial world was more than willing to provide Cray with all the money they would need to develop a new machine.Eventually, well over 80 Cray-1s were sold, the company was a huge success financially, and Cray's innovations with super computers won him the nickname "The Wizard of Chippewa Falls".An upgrade of the X-MP using high-speed memory from the Cray-2 was under development and seemed to be making real progress, and once again management was faced with two projects and limited budgets.[21] In the past Cray had always avoided using anything even near the state of the art, preferring to use well-known solutions and designing a fast machine based on them.Cray responded through "brute force", starting design of the Cray-4, which would run at 1 GHz and outpower these machines, regardless of price.[25] Cray had always resisted the massively parallel solution to high-speed computing, offering a variety of reasons that it would never work as well as one very fast processor.It did not originally occur to him to interlock in the other direction until a customer reported that localized power outages had shut down their computer, but left the cooling system running — so they arrived in the morning to find the machine encased in ice.