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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I love that product design. It's not since the Cray 2 and the CM-2 that I see such a striking piece of big iron.

Bummer it doesn't have a built in cushioned bench

it kind of looks to me like someone ran amok in the 8020 catalog. It looks pretty cool, in that prototypish kind of way.

Not to burst your bubble, but that is just the vacuum can on the dilution refrigerator and is a standard piece of hardware you will see in many physics labs. There wasn't really any product design beyond slapping the IBM logo on there.

Of course there was. Deciding what not to add is just as much of a design decision as what to add. I spend no time in physics labs, and like the parent i too find the aesthetic quite striking.

That's a lot of glass for the cleaning crew to wipe down each night. I wonder if it takes special training, or if someone just sticks a "Do not touch" Post-It note to the thing.

Or "Do Not Erase!"

Or "Do not think about it. Tantamount to observation which will interfere with the calculations."

Now I imagined replacing the glass panes with transparent LCDs or LED displays that would give an idea of system status at a glance.

These machines are, like the supercomputers I mentioned, meant to be displayed as a status symbol.

> replacing the glass panes with transparent LCDs or LED displays

I guess the CM-1/2/200 machines are the quintessential example of this. The Cray-2's cooling system isn't an active display, but it gets style points too (IMHO).

(But...I've worked in a few places that used glass windows (or other glass surfaces) as whiteboards... That's really what I was thinking of. :-) )

The Cray-2 had some indicator lights on the top of each lobe. I'm not sure how helpful they were to gain an understanding of what the computer was doing. I can't tell how much work my home cluster is doing by looking at the ethernet switch LEDs.

The LCD would nicely replicate the window-as-whiteboard experience though, at the sacrifice of some readability, because the object behind the glass is so interesting.

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