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The book "The Supermen: Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer" (1997) is great.

What struck me when reading it was that the Cray 1 that Seymor Cray designed alone in his cabin.. when it went for sale in 1977 for $7.9 million it was a 64-bit single core computer running at 80 Mhz, with 8 MB RAM. This computer could probably have run Quake! In 1977! At a respectable resolution/framerate! In 1977! :)

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Getting a decent frame buffer in those days was a significant challenge, though. It was like "Hey, the University of Qwghlm just got a 512x512x24 display, let's go apply to grad school there!"

About 20 years ago I was helping a guy design a vector unit for a new CPU. As I was writing the simulations, I began to appreciate Cray's 70s era designs, and the stuff that we manage to stuff into a few square millimeters of silicon these days. The future is here.

Ah.. I can imagine all kinds of weird bottlenecks making it hard to deliver a high-res bitmap at a reasonable framerate, or at all, to a screen back then.

Anyway, if you end up reading this: I really enjoyed so many of your dadhacker posts, years ago. Thanks.

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