September 28, 1925 born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin 1950 bachelor of science, electrical engineering, University of Minnesota 1951 master of science, applied mathematics, University of Minnesota 1950 joins Engineering Research Associates in St.Paul, Minnesota 1954 Designs Control System of Atlas II (-> ERA 1103, Univac 1103 A) UNIVAC 1103A Reference Manual 1956 Designs NTDS (Navy Tactical Data System) Computer 1957 joins Control Data Corporation 1959 Control Data 1604 / 160 (-> CDC 3000 line) 1964 Control Data 6600 (-> CDC 6000 / Cyber 70/170/180 line) 1968 Control Data 7600 1972 Control Data 8600 abandoned 1972 founds Cray Research, Inc. 1976 Cray-1(pdf,1.2 MB) (-> Cray XMP, YMP, C90, J90, T90) 1985 Cray-2 1989 founds Cray Computer Corporation 1993 first and only Cray-3 delivered to NCAR 1995 CCC files for chapter 11; Cray-4 abandoned 1995 founds SRC (Seymour Roger Cray) Computer October 5, 1996 Deceased Colorado Springs due to car accident

(Click on image to enlarge) Seymour Cray standing next to the core unit of the Cray 1 computer, circa 1974 Photograph courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

The CDC 6600 of 1964 generally is considered as the first "Supercomputer". It was unsurpassed in its speed until introduction of the CDC 7600 in 1968, which in turn was undefeated until the arrival of the Cray-1 in 1976. Further Cray Research vector machines were based upon the Cray-1 architecture. Moderate parallelism (2-64 vector processors) was added. This family continued to hold the performance leadership until arrival of massively parallel machines in the 1990s. The basic design principles of these machines not only enabled their offspring to remain in the pole position for almost thirty years, but also have influenced essentially any modern data processing device.

Further sites with material on Seymour Cray

http://www.cray.com/about_cray/seymourcray.html

Talk by Gordon Bell

http://www.8bit-museum.de/docs/cray1.htm

http://www.thocp.net/biographies/cray_seymour.htm

http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsA-H/cray.html

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