The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer

The SUPERMENAfter a rare speech at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 1976, programmers in the audience had suddenly fallen silent when Cray offered to answer questions. He stood there for several minutes, waiting for their queries, but none came. When he left, the head of NCARs computing division chided the programmers. Why didnt someone raise a hand? After a tense moment, one programmer replied, How do you talk to God? from The SUPERMEN The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the SupercomputerThey were building revolutionary, not evolutionary, machines. . . . They were blazing a trailmolding science into a product. . . . The freedom to create was extraordinary. from The SupermenIn 1951, a softspoken, skinny young man fresh from the University of Minnesota took a job in an old glider factory in St. Paul. Computer technology would never be the same, for the glider factory was the home of Engineering Research Associates and the recent college grad was Seymour R. Cray. During his extraordinary career, Cray would be alternately hailed as the Albert Einstein, the Thomas Edison, and the Evel Knievel of supercomputing. At various times, he was all threea master craftsman, inventor, and visionary whose disdain for the rigors of corporate life became legendary, and whose achievements remain unsurpassed.The Supermen is awardwinning writer Charles J. Murrays exhilarating account of how the brilliantsome would say eccentricCray and his gifted colleagues blazed the trail that led to the Information Age. This is a thrilling, reallife scientific adventure, deftly capturing the daring, seatofthepants spirit of the early days of computer development, as well as an audacious, modernday David and Goliath battle, in which a group of maverick engineers beat out IBM to become the runaway industry leaders.Murrays briskly paced narrative begins during the final months of the Second World War, when men such as William Norris and Howard Engstrom began researching commercial applications for the codebreaking machines of wartime, and charts the rise of technological research in response to the Cold War. In those days computers were huge, cumbersome machines with names like Demon and Atlas. When Cray came on board, things quickly changed.Drawing on indepth interviewsincluding the last interview Cray completed before his untimely and tragic deathMurray provides rare insight into Crays often controversial approach to his work. Cray could spend exhausting hours in singleminded pursuit of a particular goal, and Murray takes us behind the scenes to witness latenight brainstorming sessions and miraculous eleventhhour fixes. Crays casual, often hostile attitude toward management, although alienating to some, was more than a passionate need for independence; he simply thought differently than others. Seymour Cray saw farther and faster, and trusted his vision with an unassailable confidence. Yet he inspired great loyalty as well, making it possible for his own startup company, Cray Research, to bring the 54,000employee conglomerate of Control Data to its knees.Ultimately, The Supermen is a story of genius, and how a unique set of circumstancesa smallteam approach, corporate detachment, and a governmentbacked marketplaceenabled that genius to flourish. In an atmosphere of unparalleled freedom and creativity, Seymour Crays vision and drive fueled a technological revolution from which America would emerge as the worlds leader in supercomputing.