Seymour Cray's Only Surviving Talk: "Cray-1 Introduction" (1976, LANL)

[@davidapatterson]

The Cray-1 was 39 inches in diameter, just over 6 feet tall, and dissipated 100,000 watts using freon cooling. The talk is in December 1976, when Cray was 51 years old. The Cray-1 was the sixth generation of computer that he designed. He says "I figure I timed my career just about right. By the time I run out of ideas, I’ll be approaching retirement. ... I see at least three steps at, say, every four years that will produce a factor of four in speed. And I pretty much believe that."

[@willfreese]

This was way more enjoyable than I expected.

[@ChristopherPurdy2112]

"I still like Octal, I don't want any of this Hexadecimal business!" Great line from a great man!

[@nylar4000]

Classic. I had thought this was in the bit bucket.

[@James_Bowie]

That's because he was wedded to 6 bits.

[@GH-oi2jf]

@@James_Bowie- Not true. The Cray-1, and all subsequent Cray machines, had 64-bit words. There were no byte operations, but when you had character data on a Cray, it was 8-bit ASCII.

[@pederb82]

Wrong title. Not the only speech recorded by Mr Cray at all. Very calm and comfortable to listen to presenter. He know what he’s doing.

[@davidapatterson]

@davidapatterson Chuck Thacker watched the video and caught that he said "just across the Bay" so it was very likely at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, which was in the running with LANL to get the first Cray-1. LANL got 1st computer, but LLNL got the talk.

[@RichardMuise]

Seymour gave another talk that was recorded for a video series called University Video Communications. He talked about the just-delivered Cray-3. Other videos in that series includes Danny Hillis talking about the Connection Machines, Gordon Bell, Tadashi Watanabe talking about the NEC SX series, plus others talking about various processor architectures or other problems in computer science. However, none of those are online as they are copyrighted (which is a shame - they are great videos!)

[@rnb250]

The UVC talk is online now

[@Xsiondu]

Check the computer history museum channel. I've been watching the UVC talks here recently.

[@davidapatterson]

Seymour Cray introduces the Cray-1 and Q&A at the end helps explain how Cray designed fast computers. I believe the talk is at Los Alamos National Labs in 1976, which got the first Cray-1. It is still inspiring. Since Cray didn't like the spotlight nor giving talks, it may be the only surviving talk by the Father of Supercomputing. (If you know of another, please let me know.)

[@mennims]

NSA got the first cray

[@flippert0]

That's not the only surviving talks, there's a Q&A out there, where he talks about GaAs chips.

[@GH-oi2jf]

Serial 1 went to LANL for a trial, but eventually went to Great Britain to be used by ECMWF for weather forecasting. Serial 2 was never completed, because Cray had to add error correction to the memory, starting with Serial 3.

[@James_Bowie]

"Serial" refers to the production serial number. There were about 80 Cray-1 serials, and 25 Cray-2s. Cray-1 serial 1 went to Los Alamos National Lab.

[@GH-oi2jf]

@@James_Bowie - As I said. LANL is Los Alamos. Serial 1 then went to ECMWF. I worked at Cray in the 1980s and met people from ECMWF at conferences.

[@sierranevadatrail]

Nice, though the title is inaccurate, there are at least several other surviving videos of talks he gave. I have one somewhere, and if I can find it I will post it.

[@jeffm4284]

Please do

[@GH-oi2jf]

This is not his only surviving talk. He spoke at Supercomputing - ‘88, and the video is on KZbin.

[@hankjohnson2204]

I love this guy. Old-school geek.

[@briandecker8403]

23:00 - talking about impedance matching back then - incredible!

[@James_Bowie]

Impedance matching was second nature to Cray. He was a licensed radio amateur.

[@GH-oi2jf]

Why do you think that is incredible?

[@RossYoungblood]

This is an *awesome* gem of technical information. This would have been useful in the '90's-00's for people doing PC cooling.

[@ByteMeCompletely]

+Ross Youngblood Why? They didn't get the architecture right. Here we are in 2016 and Intel is STILL releasing chips with floating point errors...

[@JaredConnell]

@@ByteMeCompletely what does that have to do with cooling?

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

It’s clear from his comments the year is actually 1974. Amazing talk, though. Lots of insights into hardware design and his passion for simplicity above all else. Pity it cuts off at the end ... wonder how long more the Q&A went on for ... I suspect somebody had to come in and throw everybody out ...

[@johnsavard7583]

1974 makes sense. He gave a similar talk at a number of other universities. I remember his comment about still using octal even though he went to 64 bits... or did I just read about it? But I believe he visited the University of Alberta to give this talk, and I was present.

[@tomstech4390]

may come back later to annotate this (would be nice if someone who knew it could help) Seymour Cray and Richard Feynman are probably the 2 people i would love to meet most but will never get the chance to.

[@antigen4]

but would they want to meet you?? is the big question ...

[@vr4ever645]

Amazing footage!

[@RichardMuise]

Ah, I found the title of the talk: "What's all this about gallium arsenide?". Recorded in 1988.

[@emislive]

Talk to the Charles Babbage Institute at the U of MN if you're still in the area.

[@RichardMuise]

I think you had talks recorded for that series too ("TERABYTES, TERAFLOPS, OR, WHY WORK ON PROCESSORS WHEN I/O IS WHERE THE ACTION IS"), right? PS, loved your "Computer Architecture" book!

[@david37203]

Very cool! Thanks for posting and God bless!

[@scrfce123]

Yes. The guy who caused his accident was actually John Connor going by a pseudonym.

[@JohnLLarson]

Thank you for the advice. I found someone to help me. Thanks again. john

[@lancelotxavier9084]

NOT the only surviving video of Cray.

[@Kyus2001]

Lancelot Xavier links please

[@colinhopkins8009]

Look on KZbin

[@antigen4]

no there are other ‘talks’ documented right here in youtube even

[@rnb250]

AI needed to clean up the audio and / or transcript

[@RonJohn63]

48:48 "A simple gate could be made in just a millimeter square package" I wonder if he remembered saying that when, 20 years later, the DEC Alpha had 11 thousand gates/ square millimeter?

[@AaronR-C]

He's talking about the *package* I think he's lamenting the overhead between the silicon chip and the package it's in... all that wasted plastic and metal between those chips robbing precious picoseconds from his timings. The chips inside those Fairchild 1Kb (later ones used 4Kb chips) (57:30) packages are about 1/6 the size of the overall package.... with "1 million 64 bit words" (54:30) that's a lot of wasted circuit inches I suppose.

[@RonJohn63]

Aaron Ray-Crichton _He's talking about the package_ I don't see how that contradicts what I wrote about VLSI densities of the 1990s.

[@AaronR-C]

RonJohn63 I'm not trying to contradict you. It's certainly something to think about. I just think it's worthwhile to highlight that you're talking about gate density and his comments are on package density. They're both relevant factors of course. Funny that later Cray massively parallel systems used Alpha processors.

[@RonJohn63]

Aaron Ray-Crichton _his comments are on package density._ But who makes a 1 mm^2 package? *That* is wasteful, and why we stuff so many different features into one chip. _Funny that later Cray massively parallel systems used Alpha processors._ Exactly why I mentioned Alpha instead of Pentium. :)

[@jimvick8397]

He should have made the Superman 3 computer...

[@AyushBhattfe]

Eric Steven Raymond calls him "The Real Programmer Macho Supremo" for a reason.

[@rjl7655]

Great interesting talk. if this is 1976, why is it in b&w? it doesn't matter at all, just curious.

[@cpm1003]

This is an old video recording, and color video cameras were still very expensive in 1976. The quality of this recording is really not too good, and I kind of wish it had been filmed instead.

[@BegsToDiffer]

I always hoped Robin Williams would play Cray in a bio movie, alas that can now never be.

[@davidmaiolo]

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside

[@ByteMeCompletely]

+David Maiolo You can avoid the explosion with Control-Alt-Delete every 3 months...

[@caballerosalas]

That joke is very old, I think I heard it first from Andrew Tannenbaum

[@prufenful]

needs subtitles

[@GeekBoy03]

you can't take .000000000002 seconds to click the CC button?

[@pigpenpete]

@@GeekBoy03 The sound quality is too poor for the auto generated subtitles to work, you ass. Comes out with more nonsense than words.

[@noth606]

If you don’t understand English subtitles won’t help.

[@j.jester7821]

When this video was made, America had the greatest educational system in the world, but was already in decline. Fast forward to now... it is depressing what career politicians and teachers unions have done to our nation.

[@this.channel]

I don't get the smiling joke at the beginning. What does it mean?

[@theodricaethelfrith]

Key things: Russians, 1976, Cold War, supercomputers (which could be used for nuclear simulation, among other things). He was being diplomatic by smiling and hoping they would let it go rather than saying 'no', because he didn't want to offend them, but couldn't really visit what at that time was a sort-of-enemy nation and potentially say something at one of his talks that might help them develop supercomputers which could be used against his own country. So, in an attempt to defuse the situation, he smiled and acted as if their offer was just intended as a compliment rather than an actual invitation.

[@robertmaclean7070]

Pity about the audio quality, or the lack of it.

[@rabidbigdog]

Sure, how would you magically fix it?

[@hanniffydinn6019]

The best encasing for a super computer..... Boxes are so boring.

[@miviezgeneration]

if he was still alive, we would have AI

[@tomservo5007]

weird , I thought women in the work force didn't exist till 2016, post woke-ness' -- yet, I keep seeing old videos about STEM fields with both genders.

[@James_Bowie]

Go look at some WW2 factory footage and play spot the man.

[@vksasdgaming9472]

What is woke, except past tense for verb 'wake'? Heard about it a lot and never gotten clear explanation.