Michael Porter Visits Cray Research (1988) [video]

Spent a week at Cray in Bracknell (UK) for my "work experience" week when I was at school - I was 16 way back then (22 years ago). Originally I had wanted to go visit MicroProse but was far too late for their annual avalanche of applicants. Shockingly, nobody had ever asked Cray for something like this, and they really came through.

I spent a day with the hardware team, visited an active installation at ECMWF[0] who were then running a Y-MP C90[1].

Next I had a day or two to hang out with the software group, and was given my own(!!!) UNICOS account on one of the internal X-MP machines so that I could write a small benchmarking program in C and compare the speed of the SparcStation 5 on my desk against it (side note: I was slightly drunk while writing my code as we had been to the pub for lunch with a visiting Spanish sysadmin; again note that I was only 16 at the time, though I don't think my overseers were aware of just how young I was).

Finally, I joined the helpdesk group and was given the task of answering a couple of low-priority tickets ("Sorry professor, we know that the bounds checking in F77 has bugs, we have no plans on fixing them, and we'll will highlight the issue in the next revision of the printed manuals").

Yes, it was a highly memorable visit. I even have the t-shirt somewhere.

0: http://www.ecmwf.int 1: http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/zine/96/fall/images/c90.gif

Really interesting case study on running a super "enterprisey" company. Cray was laser focused on the super computer market. They allocated dedicated software and hardware engineers for every super computer they sold. It was interesting to hear the CEO talk and reason why they decided not to break into the mini-super computer market (lower cost and performance).

> "I think every engineer in the world would like to have their own Cray"

Interesting, most of us have machines that are roughly analogous to a mid-80's Cray machine.

I use mine to write PHP and watch Cats fall off things.

Interesting that the Apple Watch has twice the power of the Cray 2 - http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/194367/does-the-app...

For me there are two take-away points from that video: 1). do one thing and be absolutely awesome at it. 2). take complete responsibility for your customers success at using your product.

Very interesting! To think that someone would wait nine whole months for their computer to be built, by hand...