"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1"
edit: thank you for the Christmas present, yc algorithm. God bless us every one.
"The comment above was for the 2012 Pi 1. In 2020, the Pi 400 average Livermore Loops, Linpack and Whetstone MFLOPS reached 78.8, 49.5 and 95.5 times faster than the Cray 1."
Apart from the Cray-1, that whole section is also worth reading for some interesting insights into relative speed differences between various modern CPUs as well. (Though I do wish it was presented in table rather than narrative form, it’d be a lot easier to follow that way; there are also more detailed tables further down the page.)
> CDC's first products were based on the machines designed at Engineering Research Associates (ERA), which Seymour Cray had been asked to update after moving to CDC.
> Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them.
> One story has it that when Cray was asked by management to provide detailed one-year and five-year plans for his next machine, he simply wrote, "Five-year goal: Build the biggest computer in the world. One year goal: One-fifth of the above." And another time, when expected to write a multi-page detailed status report for the company executives, Cray's two sentence report read: "Activity is progressing satisfactorily as outlined under the June plan. There have been no significant changes or deviations from the June plan."
> Cray avoided publicity, and there are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work, termed "Rollwagenisms", from then-CEO of Cray Research, John A. Rollwagen. He enjoyed skiing, windsurfing, tennis, and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
Well Seymour you are an odd fellow, but I must say you design a good mainframe.
The primary operating system for the Cray-1 was the Cray Operating System (COS), which was a batch processing system. COS was specifically designed to exploit the hardware capabilities of the Cray-1, focusing on high-speed computation rather than on features like multi-user support. Given its focus on scientific and mathematical computations, COS supported compilers for languages like FORTRAN, which was the dominant language for scientific computing at the time. The Cray FORTRAN Compiler was highly optimized to take advantage of the Cray-1's vector processing capabilities. There was also a set of mathematical libraries optimized for its architecture. These libraries included routines for linear algebra, Fourier transforms, and other mathematical operations critical in scientific computing.
edit: thank you for the Christmas present, yc algorithm. God bless us every one.