Here’s an outtake photo (c. 1989) from the installation of the Cray Y-MP supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
Seymore Cray’s first supercomputer, the Cray 1, debuted in 1976 at another UC-run National lab Lab, Los Alamos. It weighed 10,500 pounds. It had 1 MB of memory and more speed (80 million computations in one second) than any other computer in the world.
These supercomputers may not seem as impressive today (especially compared to smartphones), but it was a huge asset for scientists. They used the machines to crunch through large data sets and solve problems too large for standard machines.
Amazing that a smartphone today would have more computing power than this thing.
Sidenote: That is how I must look when I try to fix something in my apartment or even just go digging to find something I put away months ago.
