[rescue] wild far-out theory.

Dave McGuire mcguire at neurotica.com
Thu Feb 7 18:14:02 CST 2002


On February 7, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> My advisor has a full CRAY1 manual, the interesting thing about it is the
> fact that it was donated to him by some high up at IBM. They went to a
> conference by Mr. Cray at Stanford (undercover I guess), so they got full
> acces to the cray-1 architecture manual. Attached to it is an internal IBM
> memo that had a report on the system and whether or not they considered it
> a threat to IBM. In short IBM was not very impressed, and they did not
> considered it much of a threat.....

  That's because they were in two very different businesses, and IBM
was VERY set in its ways at that time...much, much more so than they
are now.  Any departure from what was considered to be "standard
mainframe architecture", for ANY computer, was scoffed at by IBM in
those days.

> As my advisor says, they were right... because IBM is still in bidness and
> CRAY is no more...

  They aren't?  Hmm, funny...could've fooled me.  You can pick up the
phone and order a brand-new Cray supercomputer right now.  You might
want to suggest to your advisor that he keep up with current
events. ;)

> I can try to xerox tha manual, it is pretty thick! if anyone is
> interested.

  I'm interested.

    -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL         "Less talk.  More synthohol." --Lt. Worf



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