Seymour Cray
1925-1996
In 1968-1971, while I was working for
Control Data Corporation, I had the opportunity to work on the CDC 7600 computer
system for Seymour Cray. I was a young engineer with a fresh master's degree and
I was in awe of Seymour.
In those days there was an attitude that we could do anything with hard work and
deliberate action. I still believe in those principles and it was engineers like
Seymour that made me a "true believer".
One of my favorite stories about Seymour is that he was a very logic oriented
engineer who rarely backtracked in his hardware or software design. He would
assign jobs to technical staff and expect that the job would be done. The young
engineers assigned to him by CDC lived in fear of being "SCRAYED" in
those days.
The definition of "SCRAYED" is that Seymour Cray would end up doing
your programming job (usually overnight) and you would find the results such as
a software listing for a working program on your desk on the day it was due.
I would never let Seymour "SCRAY" me because I would work day and
night to get my work done. Seymour was fair and would give you direction if you
got into difficulty. You could not "BS" Seymour ... he already knew
the answer to his question. He was usually asking a question to see if you knew.
I still remember driving all night to his lab in Chippawa Fall from the Twin
Cities to work on special software programs and get access to the new
supercomputer CDC 7600 designated for Los Almos. At 5:00 AM, I would enter
Seymour's lab and he would be on the system working on some aspect of the
operating system.
"Good Morning Seymour. I need to get on the system!"
"O-K! But give me 10 programmer minutes!"
Translation..."I will finish up in about 20 minutes and the system is
yours".
Wow ! We had a sense of doing great things... The system was mine and mine alone
for the next three hours.
Seymour would go home and sleep until late afternoon and be ready to design
again.
I was assigned to support the delivery of the CDC 7600 to the Los Almos Nuclear
Labs and became an expert on the use of CDC computers for nuclear simulation
problems and later ABM Defense Systems.
Seymour would drink Pepsi, and he would chat with you with a Pepsi in his hand.
He had a great mind. I still enjoy drinking Pepsi and think of those days at CDC
and Seymour. Over the years, I continued to follow Seymour's engineering
activities... even as I struck out on my own into different computer application
areas as an independent consultant, and later as founder, and now CEO of
ORTHSTAR.
Seymour had an enormous influence on computing that included circuitry, logic
solutions to parallelism, cooling systems and hardware/software architecture.
J.E. Orsillo/98