Vintage Supercomputing Memorabilia

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

From the “wtf” files comes a story about vintage supercomputing goodness and the people that hoard it.  Do you have the logic boards from a Convex C1?  What about interface units from a Cray C90?  Well, you might want to hang on to them.  According to an article today at TheRegister, two individuals recently listed original gate array modules from the first Cray-1 supercomputer.  The first seller, from the UK, listed his representation of the “first” module for £550.

This seller claims that the Cray 1 module came from the very first Cray-1 super, which was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 after a bidding war with Lawrence Livermore National Lab. This original Cray-1 was shipped off to the European Weather Centre in the UK, and then absorbed into the bowels of a UK government site for heaven only knows what purpose.

Dan Mathais, who sells electronic components and houses a serious collection of vintage computing gear, list a similar Cray-1 module on eBay for $1,000.

For those of us intimately involved in the computing industry, this sort of nostalgia may hold some sort of value.  The Cray-1 is certainly worthy of certain historic merits as well.  Either way, if you’re the bloke holding on to the first light bar ever wired to a Thinking Machines CM-5, I suggest you hold on to it.

If you’re interested in reading the whole article, check it out here.

Comments

  1. Some more interesting Supercomputer Memorabilia from Cray can be seen at

    http://www.chipsetc.com/cray.html