

Cray-1 hardware reference manual - helwr
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM.html

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waterlesscloud
A current Cray- Release the Kraken! <http://www.nics.tennessee.edu/computing-
resources/kraken>

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varjag
80Mhz clock and SSE2 equivalent + 4Mb RAM in 1977, not bad at all

~~~
kolbusa
SSE2 vector registers are 128-bit, while CRAY-1 had 4096-bit ones (if I'm
reading the manual correctly). Even next-gen AVX will only have 256-bit
registers.

Sadly, the part on the instruction set is not available.

~~~
joe_bleau
Maybe you can find something else that will interest you here:
<http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/>

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pingswept
"All timing within the mainframe cabinet is controlled by a single phase
synchronous clock network."

Awesome. I would love to work on a system this simple.

~~~
dmm
If you would like access to a cray system check out <http://www.cray-
cyber.org> . They maintain free access to a number of interesting old systems,
including several crays.

EDIT: typo

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dualboot
I very much want a miniature Cray-1 for my desk.

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Maro
Imagine if Doc Brown sent you back to the future to... 1975. You'd have to re-
live the computer revolution again. You could become rich, but it'd be
painful, living without email, then using MS-DOS 4 and eagerly waiting for
Windows for Workgroups to come out =)

~~~
mahmud
Email was invented in the early 60s. In 1975, you could move to a technology
hub, get an arpanet account, and get a Xerox Alto which had both GUI and
networking, an email program, a bitmap editor, games, and ran Smalltalk and
Lisp.

Inventing the future _could_ be posh, if you're not a Unix weenie ;-)

~~~
Maro
Yes, but email wasn't universal. Today I can be sitting here in Budapest and
do bussiness with people halfway across the globe, all per email. I couldn't
do that in 1975.

Of course I wouldn't need to. I'd just buy Microsoft stock and live off that
in my penthouse suite. Well, that is until Marty McFly shows up... =)

~~~
CWuestefeld
And even when it was available, the bandwidth was small enough that you were a
little limited in what you could transfer, and how quickly it could get there.

I remember circa 1989 when my school (RPI) got onto NYSERNET, at what I
believe was a 56kbps link. How much correspondence can be shoved through a
pipe that size?

Around that same timeframe, outside of academia, us hobbyists that wanted more
widespread communication were relying on things like FidoNet[1]. That would
package up a BBS's messages and ship them out on a nightly basis -- to a
limited number of nodes (I think), so it could take quite a while for messages
to propagate to the entire network.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet>

~~~
zandorg
Actually, I had email on dialup in 1997, and you could download a modest
amount of single user's email, and refresh newsgroups, in about 4 minutes
flat.

