"The search for the lost Cray supercomputer OS"

On 1/20/14 8:03 AM, Ken Seefried wrote: We wondered about that as users inside Apple. I've heard the same arguments happened inside LLnL WRT their Crays. Just why, exactly, were we paying all this money to run an XMP-48 to run Unix? In the end, for the applications that really ran on it, it didn't make any sense and it was replaced with an EL, then it went away completely. Apple's Cray was probably the most underutilized supercomputer on the planet at the time. I found out years later why they bought it. A senior project manager proposed a research project to find out what personal computers would be like if they had the power of a Cray, so they bought a Cray to find out! This was part of the same effort (Aquarius) to build their own 4 Core shared cache microprocessor. The project didn't survive after the company that was going to fab the chip decided to get out of the project and Apple management lost interest in it (late 80's). Technology-wise, it was about 10 years too early. You couldn't build a part that big and put it into a personal computer. By the late-90's it might have been possible, other than the little problem of Apple not having the volume to have it make sense.