
Homebrew Cray-1A - luu
http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
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noir_lord
Fascinating project, I used to love reading about those machines and the
follow on Crays as a child in the 80's, the idea of having 128 or even 256Mb
of RAM seemed absolutely absurd and that I could one day own a machine with
computational performance measured in Teraflops would have seemed absurd.

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testbro
The other companion to this work (recovering COS disk images) is worth a read
too [1]. Someone picked up where Chris left off and managed to get the images
booting in an emulator [2].

[1] :
[http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130807191943/http://www.chr...](http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130807191943/http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-
recovery/)

[2] : [http://modularcircuits.tantosonline.com/blog/articles/the-
cr...](http://modularcircuits.tantosonline.com/blog/articles/the-cray-files/)

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th0br0
Aand another page bites the HN dust. Sadly it's not in the google cache yet
either

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frozenport
Interestingly the first time it made HN it didn't go down.

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jacquesm
HN got a _lot_ bigger since then.

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frozenport
I judge my Internet community on the size of the reply dialog. This piques my
interest because I don't know exactly how big HN has grown. Certainly the
content has experienced a drastic shift from pure CS to general interest
technology.

~~~
jacquesm
A good indicator is the maximum number of upvotes a thread gets.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

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JeremyMorgan
Good old WordPress. HN and Lifehacker bombs are what made me leave it behind.

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JshWright
Spend 5 minutes setting up a caching plugin and it won't even flinch at an HN
traffic spike.

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JeremyMorgan
I spent plenty of time with caching and optimization, CDN all of that.
Octopress dropped my load time by a huge margin, simply because I wasn't
hitting a database a bunch of times for no reason.

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VLM
"Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600"

Hey I have one of those Digilent spartan 1600 boards at home! Those are nice
boards. Needless to say the cray is not going to fit in a little CPLD, and a
1600 is moderately big for home use. The Xilinx software to compile and
download bitstreams is not open source but is free and trivially installable
under Debian linux. I have a very long G+ post explaining how to go from a
bare Debian linux install to compiling and running CPLD code, but it boils
down to, other than taking a long time and being a PITA there's nothing
terribly difficult about it. Its fun and easy to mess with FPGAs/CPLDs at
home. Xilinx uses basically the same software (plus or minus various
utilities) to program their whole line from five year old CPLDs to the latest
FPGAs.

You can also download 80s microcomputers, PDP10s and PDP11s, PDP8s, all manner
of classic fun onto a FPGA of that size.

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contingencies
I saw a carpenter building a full scale unit at the beginning of OHM2013 in
Holland a month ago, though I'm not sure about the innards or whether it was
ever finished:
[https://ohm2013.nl/wiki/User:OHM2013/Cray1](https://ohm2013.nl/wiki/User:OHM2013/Cray1)

