Still twitching: big computers.(mainframe manufacturers adapt and survive in a PC world)
Economist (US), The, April, 1995
THEY don't make people like Seymour Cray anymore. Now they don't make machines like his, either. The supercomputer pioneer's company, Cray Computer, has filed for protection from its creditors under chapter 11 of America's bankruptcy laws. But before writing this off as another casualty of the drive towards ever smaller computers, consider the other lumpen descendant of Mr Cray's "big- iron" creations: the mainframe. This year customers will buy 3,000 of the things--and mainframe makers are turning in surprisingly good results. What is going on?
Mr Cray's vision, from the Univac 1604 mainframe, which he designed in the 1950s, to the Cray 1 supercomputer (1976), was of centralised computing power and control: a liquid-nitrogen cooled black shrine in the middle of a...
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