1970 to 1979: Computers and Software Begin Creating Wealth - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 140

search and development in CA show that the company was serious about software
engineering.
Cray Computers
In 1972, the well-known computer designer Seymour Cray left Control Data Cor-
poration (CDC) and started his own company, Cray Research. The research labs
were in Chippewa Falls, Minnesota, and its corporate headquarters was in Min-
neapolis, Minnesota. The first Cray-1 supercomputer was installed in 1976 at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Cray computers were among the first supercomputers and, indeed, the Cray-1
was the fastest computer of the time. Seymour Cray soon dropped out as CEO and
became an independent consultant, starting several more companies. His original
company filed for bankruptcy in 1995.
The technologies used in the Cray computer lines were advanced for the era
and pioneered a number of innovations. The high-cost, high-speed innovations of
the Cray line became prestigious, and major companies and national governments
were proud to be known as Cray computer users.
The idea of superfast computers resonated through the industry. Cray triggered
a number of competitive companies in later decades and more or less pioneered
the supercomputer.
Supercomputers were used for very difficult problems that required intensive
and rapid calculations: weather predictions, nuclear physics, fluid dynamics, lo-
gistics, and other complex problem areas.
Eventually, monoprocessor supercomputers such as the Cray line began to en-
counter competition from massively parallel arrays of computers. Because fast
monoprocessors were expensive, while small parallel computers were cheap, the
market for supercomputers began to shift toward parallelism.
Because a major feature of computers is high processing speed, computer man-
ufacturers often compete for speed records. In 1976, when the Cray-1 high-speed
computer was first built, it established a world speed record for the era by calculat-
ing at a rate of 160 megaflops (a megaflop is one million floating point operations
per second).
Over the years, IBM, Fujitsu, Cray, and other companies would have heated
competition for these high-end supercomputers.