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Seymour Cray's path to supercomputing

With unique designs and a quirky imagination, Seymour Cray built unusual and spectacular supercomputers.

James Martin
James Martin is the Managing Editor of Photography at CNET. His photos capture technology's impact on society - from the widening wealth gap in San Francisco, to the European refugee crisis and Rwanda's efforts to improve health care. From the technology pioneers of Google and Facebook, photographing Apple's Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sundar Pichai, to the most groundbreaking launches at Apple and NASA, his is a dream job for any documentary photography and journalist with a love for technology. Exhibited widely, syndicated and reprinted thousands of times over the years, James follows the people and places behind the technology changing our world, bringing their stories and ideas to life.
James Martin
Cray-1A supercomputer
1 of 9 Stephen Shankland/CNET

One of Seymour Cray's iconic Cray-1A supercomputers is shown at the London Science Museum. Its design is cylindrical to reduce wire lengths and features a base you can sit on.

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2 of 9 James Martin/CNET

Early computers worked sequentially, processing one number at a time, but these supercomputing Cray-1 machines increased speeds by processing calculations in an assembly line formation.

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3 of 9 James Martin/CNET

The Cray-1 sold for $10 million and used 115kW of power -- enough to power around 100 homes. The new supermachine was 10 times faster than other computers of the era. 

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4 of 9 James Martin/CNET

Cray stuffed an incredible 60 miles of wire into his Cray-1 machine. Part of the reason for the machine's cylindrical design was to reduce each wire's length to just 3 inches to minimize signal delays.

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5 of 9 Stephen Shankland/CNET

A Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985 at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

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6 of 9 James Martin/CNET

A Cray-2 488 MFLOPS/CPU with a memory of 512MW, seen here on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Released in 1985, each of the 27 machines made cost between $12 million and $20 million.

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7 of 9 James Martin/CNET

The Cray-2 implemented an unusual cooling system that immersed dense stacks of circuit boards in a special liquid called Flourinert, which was cooled in this tank.

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8 of 9 James Martin/CNET

A massive clump of wires that is a Cray-3 CPU section from the 1995-era Cray Computer Corporation. Only one of the Cray-3 machines was delivered before the company went bankrupt.

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9 of 9 James Martin/CNET

In 1980, "wiring ladies" working on the Cray-1 would've worn this simple smock as they spent months inside the machines under production weaving together miles of wire to form these newest supercomputers.

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