jmg@dolphy.UUCP (Intergalactic Psychic Police Of Uranus) (10/17/85)
******* > Re: Cray-2 impressions > (Somone experienced computer user (grossly paraphrashed)) > The cray2 is small & it has nice blue glass and you could > and you could see the coolant circulate around the boards... (and) > "I haven't heard of a single person who has stood in the middle of the > Cray 2 and was not impressed." Cray Corp always designes their products well; none of this reconditioned 2001 refrigerator stuff...Hell, I was on the design team for the Auragen fault-tolerant distributed unix cptr and 'they' tried to put it into something akin to a washer/dryer unit...'they' went bankrupt...I was always trying to get them to adopt the look of the Sabrets Hot Dog Stands you see on the corners in NYC -- umbrella and all...but it was no go... Their idea of high tech is so arcane...a Sabrets Hot Dog that did 1k Mips would be great, it would even be better than a blue circular couch/wall unit that has to be kept in a cool room (and lit with flourescent lights). A washer & dryer unit is obviously from the 50's...nothing but a convenience item, and now its too big to say `High Technology'. With 785 & 8600 DEC is staying with the air-conditioned multiple wall closet look with which they've had such success, but they may have to re-think that with the RISC machines...though Pyramid, gad!, they were stuck just as soon as they took their name...they're solution is to slant in the sides of the refrigerator and put a dark grill around it as if it were a ferrari (ask any psychiatrist about cars)... at least you can imagine the apex of the refrigerator meeting 50 feet above your head (it would make Frididaire & Freud proud). All this just circles the area, the architecture/quality of the machine is reflected in the box it's in. It would be an amusing lie to shape a computer like a ladder, because "a ladder extends us beyond ourselves, hence it's importance. (and) what is the use of a ladder in space?" You could imagine neo-classic styles -- it would be something only the defense dept would buy: imagine a pure white ionic column... PC's look exactly the way they are, big clumsy lumps...no screen graphic is gonna save it. The possibilities are ripe. You could even do a 60's art thing: have the form reflect the systems nature of the thing: machines shaped likes branching trees or little pods attaching to a common mother tube or some other god awful metaphor. The eighties? Well there are lots of small art movements now, nothing localized and central...it would seem a bit out of place to do the Manchester Pipeline Machine in a German Expressionist style, but then only the designers know for sure. Jeffrey Greenberg ihnp4!allegra!phri!dolphy!jmg PS: Would the person who left their white plastic briefcase with the initials 3b2/300 on our table please come pick it up?
brooks@lll-crg.ARpA (Eugene D. Brooks III) (10/18/85)
In article <16@dolphy.UUCP> jmg@dolphy.UUCP (Intergalactic Psychic Police Of Uranus) writes: >******* >fault-tolerant distributed unix cptr and 'they' tried to put it into >something akin to a washer/dryer unit...'they' went bankrupt...I was always There is some merit to this. That wasted space people have been standing in could be closed up and one could do dry cleaning in there using the coolant in the Cray 2.
fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU (Erik E. &) (10/19/85)
The other thing that's cute about the Cray-2 is the set of clear plexiglass cooling fluid holding towers. They stand off to one side of the CPU cabinet, just shy of 6' tall, and one or two of them have the blue tinged cooling fluid cascading down inside them when the machine is operating. Can't say I think much of their choice of console, though. I mean, an AT&T made IBM PC clone? C'mon! I was hoping for something suitably impressive like the old CDC6400 console that's sitting in a hallway of the UCB Computer Center (the 6400 has been de-commissioned for about two years now). It looks like a great squatting bug (with two huge round CRTs for eyes). Or at least a SGI IRIS workstation so that you could have neat graphical system monitors... Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU
omondi@unc.UUCP (Amos Omondi) (10/21/85)
The realization that it is not what is inside the box, but rather what the box looks like, is a long overdue one ! Things like parallel proce- ssing will not save computer architecture if the packaging is not right. The reason that architectures like the IBM 360s were so successful commercially had to do with the box which diplayed an impressive array of switches and lights; put inside a large room with large glass windows for users to gawk through, this made everyone happy. The PDP11s were largely successful because of the front loading switches and register displays which allowed one to hand-bootstrap the thing and watch the happenings on the displays. Similarly, the CDC 6600 still holds the record as the largest selling supercomputer because of its shape and the array of start-up switches. Seymour Cray continuing the trend of the CDC machines clearly made the right decision in going for the brightly coloured love-seat design, and the blue glass with fluorescent lights will make the Cray-2 another success. The current plain-white-box approach is obviously a retrograde step in computer architecture and explains many of its current woes. PCs have gone for this new-fangled style in a big way and their only saving grace is that one can usually hear the machine think ( ocassionally this is mistaken for disc-drive noise ). The other wrong idea that currently pervades computer architecture is the idea that "small is beautiful"; anyone who has sat in a room with a CDC 6600 on a cold winter day will have no doubts about why the machine was so successful. Let's get things right ! All this dataflow, demandflow, shmenalflow stuff will not save the day ! Get the box right--then worry about what to put inside !