For my birthday I received a copy of "The Supercomputer Era" by Sidney Karin and Norris Parker Smith. It's a little hard to track down (my copy is ex. Coleman College Library, La Mesa, California - never checked out!) but provides an interesting, nostalgic look at the state of the supercomputer industry c. 1987. The framework for the book is the (then) shiny new San Diego Supercomputer Centre (SDSC). Much is made of the bleeding edge technology implemented at that site, including dual 50Mbit HYPERnet networking to link their Cray X-MP/48 and SCS-40 to the "Common File System" based around an IBM4381 with a whopping 35GB of online storage (20 GB IBM3380 and a 15GB STC8380 disk drives). With 21 years of hindsight whilst enjoying the book, it's quite sad to read some of the predictions. When written, the Cray 3 with its gallium arsenide seniconductors was tipped for great things, and the ETA-10 at the Von Neumann Centre was expected to conquer all. Knowing the eventual direction the supercomputing field took with massive parallel arrays (and clusters) of scalar processors, I really miss the exotic cool of the old-school vector beasts. Reminds me of the famous Seymour Cray quote: "I'd rather have two bulls pulling my plough than 1000 chickens". It's a great read, anyway, if you can get hold of a copy. As an aside (and to provide a little more meat to this rambling post), whilst reading the above and stopping every 5 minutes to follow something up on the interweb I came across a really interesting website detailing "Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present". Apologies if it's common knowledge or has been discussed at length before, but much of it was new and interesting to me. http://jbayko.sasktelwebsite.net/cpu.html -Austin.