Seymour Cray - Cray Research

Cray Research

The split was fairly amicable, and when he started Cray Research in a new laboratory on the same Chippewa property a year later, Norris invested $300,000 in start-up money. Like CDC's organization, Cray R&D was based in Chippewa Falls and business headquarters were in Minneapolis. Unlike CDC, Cray's manufacturing was also in Chippewa Falls.

At first there was some question as to what exactly the new company should do. It did not seem that there would be any way for them to afford to develop a new computer, given that the now-large CDC had been unable to support more than one. When the President in charge of financing traveled to Wall Street to look for seed capital, he was surprised to find that Cray's reputation was very well known. Far from struggling for some role to play in the market, the financial world was more than willing to provide Cray with all the money they would need to develop a new machine.

After several years of development their first product was released in 1976 as the Cray-1. As with earlier Cray designs, the Cray-1 made sure that the entire computer was fast, as opposed to just the processor. When it was released it easily beat almost every machine in terms of speed, including the STAR-100 that had beaten the 8600 for funding. The only machine able to perform on the same sort of level was the ILLIAC IV, a specialized one-off machine that rarely operated near its maximum performance, except on very specific tasks. In general, the Cray-1 beat anything on the market by a wide margin.

Serial number 001 was "lent" to Los Alamos in 1976, and that summer the first full system was sold to the National Center for Atmospheric Research for $8.8 million. The company's early estimates had suggested that they might sell a dozen such machines, based on sales of similar machines from the CDC era, so the price was set accordingly. Eventually, well over 80 Cray-1s were sold, and the company was a huge success financially.

Follow-up success was not so easy. While he worked on the Cray-2, other teams delivered the two-processor Cray X-MP, which was another huge success and later the four-processor X-MP. When the Cray-2 was finally released after six years of development it was only marginally faster than the X-MP, largely due to very fast and large main memory, and thus sold in much smaller numbers. The Cray-2 ran at 250 MHz with a very deep pipeline, making it harder to code for than the shorter pipe X-MP.

As the Cray-3 project started he found himself once again being "bothered" too much with day-to-day tasks. In order to concentrate on design, Cray left the CEO position of Cray Research in 1980 to become an independent contractor, working from a new laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, near the site of NCAR and the earlier attempted Cray Laboratories.

In 1989 Cray was faced with a repeat of history when the Cray-3 started to run into difficulties. An upgrade of the X-MP using high-speed memory from the Cray-2 was under development and seemed to be making real progress, and once again management was faced with two projects and limited budgets. They eventually decided to take the safer route, releasing the new design as the Cray Y-MP.