Cray-1 hardware reference manual | Hacker News Reader

Cray-1 hardware reference manual

ed-thelen.org

41 pointshelwr19 comments

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

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

Could have run Doom, or Quake with a strict asset diet and slightly lower geometry complexity. Of course, that assumes hi color output and some audio.

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.

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

Echoing joe_bleau, a scanned PDF of the whole manual can be found at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/2240004C-1977-Cray1.pdf

According to Wikipedia, in 1976 Los Alamos got the first one ... with I'm sure much less polished documentation ^_^.

"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.

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

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

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 =)

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 ;-)

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... =)

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

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.

And soon after 1864, you could have been faxing documents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph

A Unix weenie would still have a good time back in 1975.

But I have to agree some 70's technology puts to shame lots of stuff we have now.

I am only half-joking when I say ST-80 makes Java'2010 look primitive.

The way to do it would be to get a job as a regular employee at somewhere like Microsoft and just wait. Jump ship to Netscape and then Google when the time was right.

In terms of tech skills, what would you actually be able to transfer with you? C and FORTRAN probably. Even SQL wasn't big back then.

Who would wait? "Say, every thought about arranging code as Objects?"

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