[rescue] wild far-out theory.

[Dave McGuire]

On February 7, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> He is perfectly aware of that... clearly you did not get the irony. Cray
> as Cray Research Incorporated (CRI), or Cray Computer Corporation (CCC)
> exist no more. However the company formely known as TERA bought CRAY,

  Bought != dead.  Look at the US Presidency for a big example.

> pretty much for the name (not for the technology clearly, the only lineup
> leftover were the SVs but that is because they get the huge gov

  The SV line is being actively developed, and is not considered (within
Tera or in the supercomputer industry) to be a leftover.  Tera bought
Cray for the name and for the SV line, and for some of the technology
used in the T90.

> subsidies). I have friends who used to work there, and they refer to that
> company as TERA... The main reason my advisor considers CRAY to be dead is
> that when we got offers from them for the new bioinformatics cluster,
> instead of pushing the T3, they wanted us to consider their 
> Rack'o'DELLs... so we got the impression that the t3 will soon EOL'd.

  They might be...The T3 series is a few years old now.

> My advisor has no saying in whether IBM was afraid of CRAY. He just showed
> me the manual as a historic piece, specially since it has the IBM's memo
> attached to it. So no reason to call him names :-), plus the whole comment
> was taken out of context I guess. His point is that if you look at the
> top500 list today, it is kind of scary how IBM has over 4 times more share
> than CRAY!

  I call everyone names. ;)

> However you also forgot that IBM was not, an is not, just a mainframe,
> bidnes oriented company.

  In 1974 (the period we're discussing) they most certainly were...there
were very few minis at the time, and no micros.

> They actually have a relatively significant
> scientific customer base, and that is what the memo kind of addresses.

  ...which all used mainframes, because they were the only thing
available aside from a few minis, which (in most cases) were much
lower-performance machines.

> That is why IBM was intrigued about the CRAY-1 when it first came out.
> Besides they did not care that much about the actual machine, but rather
> what was inside the shell, i.e. the ideas implemented. Were the
> technologies been deployed in the fabrication of the cray a threat to
> IBM's? What was the state of IBMs internal research compared to CRAY's,
> etc... 

  Understood...I think we're probably saying the same thing but going
about it in a very different way.  IBM has more employees at the
director level alone than Cray has ever had, period...Cray (through
whatever names and iterations) is (and always was) a small and very
specialized company, while IBM was more generalized.  Cray has never
made, for example, typewriters.  Only supercomputers.

    -Dave

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