* Posts by Chris Watson

1 publicly visible post • joined 5 Jan 2008

Remembering the Cray-1

Chris Watson

Shell Wythenshaw, I sat on a Cray-1

On a school trip with about five other students I visited the Shell site in Wythenshaw. We got a full site tour, I got a close look at their Cray-1 Super Computer. This would be about 1982.

I was already aware of its reputation and was very chuffed to get up close. And yes, I got a look inside the C shape, and sit on the bench. On another floor they had 50 IBM PC's hooked up to the Cray to handle communication with storage, that being 10 fixed Winchester stacks, and another 15 demountable stacks. Seem to recall they were about 25MB's each.

We also visited an enormous tape storage room and I got to load a tape into one on to a tape drive. It had an automatic sliding door to reveal the spindles, and sucked the end of the tape in using air.

Chris, Manchester