1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch | Hacker News Reader

1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch

chrisfenton.com

382 pointsakkartik68 comments

My Dad was at the forefront of the computer revolution. He talked about sharing time with Seymour Cray at his computer lab at the University of Minnesota. He said whenever Cray would show up on campus, it was like Mick Jagger or some other rock star type. People would flock to be around him and ask him questions.

He then worked alongside Cray and sold many of his computers when they were both at Control Data. He has a ton of stories of how he would go into huge companies like 3M and tell them everything they knew about data storage was about to change. He said their jaws would drop when he gave them numbers on how much they were going to save by using the new Cray computers.

Its very cool and nostalgic to hear people doing these projects and keeping the early days of the computer revolution alive.

I really feel like Cray was a larger than life person with any of the stories I've read. It really makes me wonder why no one has made a docudrama movie about him...hmm

I had the opportunity to work for Seymour Cray when he split off Cray Computer Corp. from Cray Research in ‘89 and a bunch of us moved to Colorado Springs. He was a fairly quiet and intense guy, always focused on whatever the “pacing item” of the project happened to be that day.

How many tens of thousands of computer architects... how many millions of creative ideas....

..and how Few people actually came up with anything which really moved the needle.

This would be a great prop for time travel scifi movie.

Protagonist travels to 1991 and tries to convince scientist to help him. When asked for a proof, shows Gray C90 Wristwatch. "Our real computers are different, but I show you this because it does not pollute the timeline."

This is refreshing. A premise for a time travel movie that is both accurate in terms of its portrait of computers, and it doesn't present basic time travel "oopsies" .

I'm definitely packing this with me if I ever time travel.

My premise for a time travel movie is very simple.

1. Buy a book on probability. Work through the practice exercises.

2. Time travel back to a time before the laws of probability were invented or taken seriously. Pre-1600's would be a good guess.

3. Become a gambler.

4. With the riches that will soon be pouring into your pockets, acquire resources and transform history.

Travel to May 22, 2010.

Buy two large pizzas, cheese and 'supreme'.

Be earlier than that guy.

Credits.

Gambling is not the way to get rich.

To get really rich you need to aquire people, their time and productivity. Instead of probability you need means to get people's minds so with them you can conquer territories and establish kingdom to be really rich.

It's always the accent that gives away time travellers.

Only real possibilities to avoid exile/asylum/imprisonment/execution for most of history would seem to hinge on predicting celestial events and making gunpowder, as Twain observed.

The issue with getting rich gambling is not knowing the probability, it's getting other people to continue paying you when you win large amounts and/or consistently.

Even in today's professional gambling establishments (financial markets) big winners are often cut off in the name of stability.

If you know the exact results (like Biff in Back to the Future), winning things like lotteries or horse race results multiple times will draw attention.

Actually, any kind of money hoarding - moreso than anyone else - will draw the attention. Which might be OK, of course, but if you make waves that are too big, you'll affect global policy and the course of (economic) history, and all your predictions may be off.

But, getting significant but non-controlling stakes in various successful stocks might work. You'd be like Warren Buffet, who I consider to be rich, but otherwise anonymous.

In other words you end up in manure anyway.

I actually loved the side-plot in "About Time" where the main character went back in time and changed something and then they had a different child and then had to undo their change.

Create life and casualty insurance!

Illegal in that period. Something like shipping insurance can be built from a repurchase agreement and this may get around usury/gambling laws, but how do you do that for life insurance? That takes more legal than probability knowledge. Also do you have the skills to combat insurance fraud?

Annuities are the same math but different product, and got valued first by Haley. I'm not aware of life insurance being illegal per se, and there might be ways to work around it via structuring as a fraternal organization ala the origins of the insurance industry in the US.

3. Become a bookmaker/start a casino.

It's like being a gambler, but you get to stack the odds in your favour, deliberately, tell people you've done so, and have everyone be fine with that. If you use any knowledge of future events to stack a few odds a little more in your favor, no-one's going to know any different, and they'll attribute any weird variances in your income to the punters who all made poor bets, rather than to your mad odds-setting skills.

If you're going to gamble, always be the house. Only a complete moron can lose money that way.

I used to have a system to play the instant lottery multiple times a day and make every single ticket a winner... I owned a liquor store that sold tickets. We made enough on lottery sales to cover our payroll completely.

5. Eventually get bludgeoned to death in a moist alleyway.

Set where? Gambling was criminalized in the UK in 1541 and Europe's first legal gambling house didn't open until 1638.

Maybe they learn roulette strategy and show up right after Pascal invented the roulette wheel while he was trying to produce a perpetual motion machine (which could play a role in the time machine's tech itself too, which could resemble a "grande roue," visually akin to a g-force centrifuge or particle accelerator).

Do you know until fisher comes asking probability or the Bayesian version is always about gambling. Mostly as we have evolution type but …

Might be a time traveller.

It still did just you being there and a small computer not tons weight.

No news so far of alien visit or time traveller … but it might be hard if they tried to avoid us … except for selling something like enterprise Vulcan did to help education fund which is more physical and hence possible.

I love to imagine this kind of thing dug up by an alien civilization. That it displays the moons of Jupiter will be a fun puzzle and a source of wonder. “Obviously”, they will say, “these people must have worshipped Jupiter as a god and used the position of its moons to keep time.” But the pieces of the puzzle will never quite fit.

Who knows, maybe the Antikythera mechanism or the pyramids were a similarly ludicrous prank?

"Some people (X'Grn'k et al) say it was a device used for humorous purposes. However, we consider that the presence of sacred etched silicon devices rules this hypothethis out. While crudely worked in that time, and despite the abundance of raw material on the planet, such silicon was in short supply and was central to the nascent Guptian Church movement. In addition, records suggest that the "geo"politics of the time, somewhere between 1980 and 2050, had silicon artisanry in constant high military demand (see the F'llr'wq Metaversity analysis on use of Phonic Screen Devices in Central-West Asian planet-surface warfare between 1945 and 2045), and if not inducted into the Guptian priesthood, a silicon carver could expect a so-called 99-6 life, a 105-Earth-hour cycle with 99 hours in a warfab and 6 hours to rest (J'Hrar et al). Furthermore, per a recent discovery of a transaction record thought likely to be payment for living volume at the Western-American coastal enclave, the artisan class appears to have little in the way of disposable resourcing. Thus, we consider it unlikely that an artisan of that period could have spared or even been allowed the resources or time for such levity."

I am now adding "Silicon Carver" to my resume.

Alien researcher: In fact, the dull-gray color is an artifact of aging. Ancient hoomans decorated their ritualistic jewelry with shiny black, and metallic reds and blues.

Here is a reconstruction of how it would have looked in their prime: shows colorful C90 watch render, fist risen up to the sky, other hoomans kneeling around the Cray high priest

Will a future design include the external heat exchanger unit? Maybe belt attached? The SSD on the other wrist, perhaps? :)

I love to see these projects keeping the legacy of these old, great machines alive, if not running some fraction of unicos, at least aesthetically.

I am personally asking, because after decades of tech hobbies, I have a bit of a self awareness to 'fun':

I wonder what the fun part was, to them.

There is something rewarding about learning. There is something rewarding about completing things. There is something rewarding about showing other people.

I have the issue that everything I make should be practical. Either net me profit so I can make lots of money. Or useful to society so I can reduce the world's pain and increase pleasure, maybe this is a selfish way to fame.

I still get all 3 of those rewards I previously mentioned, but there is something different going on when I'm doing something for profit/others. Its a different feeling, not better/worse, just different. Better in some ways, worse in others.

Author here! Most of my projects are kind of like this penny arcade comic (https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/06/13/the-hippothala...) - I saw where something was not, and said "No. This will not do." It's 2024 and a supercomputer wrist watch is possible, so now it exists =)

I don't have anything to say, technical-wise, but this is absurd and I love it.

The round displays are so cool

Uses an FPGA lol damn that's hardcore

FPGAs were an odd experience of learning for me. I started thinking they were hard to program. Then once I got halfway decent at simple things, I realized just how powerful they can be. So many things just run faster if not instantaneously if you optimize for FPGA. It's incredible. And with modern cheapy low end boards, I hope they get more popular in projects.

It is on my list of things to learn/have one (Orange Crab). I just haven't had a specific use yet. I know they use them for video out/camera for example. One day... so many things to learn/need time.

The orange crab looks nifty. My recommendation is to start very very simple. I'm not sure how this board integrates with the tools with their DFU mode and all that, but hopefully it allows the same quick iteration as JTAG. I think the next time if any you feel like using a microcontroller, try using the FPGA instead.

Thanks. I listen to EmbeddedFM and I always hear about JTAG but have not used one. Interesting thought about subsituting an FPGA for a microcontroller. Guess you would have to know how to use one in order to do something trivial like blink/move a servo.

FPGA is the only thing where I haven't seen any progress in my understanding after trying to get anywhere for hours and hours.

I get that. I think it took me a full semester in uni, and a summer internship, and maybe a few more months after that. It's hard to really break through. But once I did, it got a lot easier.

FPGAs are particularly amazing for this sort of project where you would otherwise need a custom ASIC that could never be even remotely economical to build (see my 16-core Z80 laptop as another excellent example: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/). It lets you play 'fantasy computer architect.'

Best statement ever, "... using it should be as incomprehensible as my motivation for creating it in the first place!"

I thought this was funny until the last picture, then I thought it was great.

Haha yeah, the "A 25:1 Replica of my wristwatch" image caption cracked me up.

reminds me of the thing in model railroading, where actual IRL rail equipment is referred to as "prototype" for the model

Thanks for the smile OP.

How soon until the 1/25-scale cray C90 gets as many MIPS as the original? Seems like the one he built is within shouting distance.

Love the project, writing style and what is was made of (fpga, round lcd, Jupiter moons sim... so cool). But now I'm frustrated I can't see the display animation.

It updates in pretty close to realtime (ie the simulator timestep is extremely close to the actual wall clock time required to compute the next timestep), so “animation” isn’t really the right word. If you let it go for a few hours it leaves fun star trails though!

Pointed a friend toward this. He thought it was cool, but said he’d never wear a Cray wristwatch because he heard they run fast.

The lead photo doesn't give you a good impression of the size of the thing, he saves that for the end.

His writing style cracks me up. What about battery life though?

It's . . . not great.

” But how do you tell the time?

With great difficulty.”

No upholstery?!

So pointless it had to be done. Bravo!

That's so dang cool.

Absolutely amazing work!

I honesty dream of having a real old Cray 1 as a couch :-) - those designs were just something we don’t see today, huh!?

liquid cooled ?

maybe if the designer was not resistant to proofing it

Brilliant.

Does it run vim? :-)

Very ugly obviously

> The display shows a free-running simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons. For convenience, I just plot the X/Y coordinates of each moon in the ecliptic plane. The ephemerides come from the HORIZONS server that NASA operates, at a specified date and time. The J90 just dumps a new frame whenever the Teensy has pulled the previous one, so with a teensy (ha!) bit of calibration on the micro controller side, it would be pretty easy to have the frames dumped in ‘real time’, which, knowing the starting time and date, would allow you to not-at-all-easily infer the current time by looking at the positions of Jupiter’s moons.

Someone finally came up with a time system more difficult for people to use than Star Trek's stardates.

> Someone finally came up with a time system more difficult for people to use than Star Trek's stardates

I think that’s a reference to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Satelli... or a (late) attempt to win a longitude reward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards)

I dunno. For certain astronomy geeks, it's a completely intuitive clock.

> [a picture of a cray c90 computer]

> A 25:1 Replica of my wristwatch

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