Seymour Cray: The Reclusive Genius Who Invented the Supercomputer

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Seymour Cray designed the fastest computers on Earth and unwound by digging a tunnel beneath his house, joking that elves visited him there with engineering answers. Born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, he built a device from an erector set at age ten that turned punched paper tape into Morse code. After working on Japanese naval codes as a radio operator in World War II, he joined Engineering Research Associates in 1950 and co-founded Control Data Corporation with William Norris in 1957.

This episode follows Cray's lifelong flight from corporate noise and his fixation on speed. The CDC 6600 crushed IBM's rival projects, the Cray-1 sold for 8.8 million dollars in 1976, and his machines ran so hot they needed liquid cooling cast into the frame. It also covers the gamble that undid him: betting the Cray-3 on brittle gallium arsenide chips while the industry shifted to massively parallel machines built from cheap standard processors.

• The CDC 6600 gained its edge from peripheral processors, small built-in computers that handled data traffic so the main processor never stopped calculating.
• To escape visiting managers, Cray had a lab built on his own land in Chippewa Falls, far enough from headquarters to discourage drop-ins and trivial phone calls.
• He drew circuits by hand on graph paper and used Maxwell's equations to make every wire the same electrical length, zigzagging them so signals arrived in sync.
• Asked for a five-year plan, he said his goal was to build the biggest computer in the world, and his one-year plan was to do one-fifth of that.
• Cray Computer Corporation went bankrupt in 1995, and Cray died in the fall of 1996 after a rollover crash in Colorado, shortly after founding SRC Computers to build a parallel machine.