Supercomputer Pioneer Dies From Crash Injuries Seymour Cray Took Computers From Tubes To Transistors

Computer wizard Seymour Cray, who pioneered the use of transistors in computers and later developed massive supercomputers to run business and government information networks, died Saturday at age 71.

Cray died of complications from severe injuries suffered in a traffic crash. His Jeep was hit by another car Sept. 22 and rolled three times.

Cray is credited with revolutionizing computer speed.

“Cray’s genius and singular drive have already marked indelibly the technology of this century,” Business Week magazine wrote in 1990.

In a world where time is measured in increments faster than the blink of an eye, Cray’s benchmark achievements were accompanied by painful setbacks.

Still, Cray spent 40 relentless years searching for a scientific Holy Grail, the world’s fastest supercomputer.

For many years, Cray Research was the U.S. leader in supercomputers, multimillion-dollar machines used for sophisticated tasks like forecasting weather or building bombs.

“There wouldn’t really be a supercomputer industry as we know it except for Seymour Cray,” said Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. “I really think his achievement was the creation of computers that were essential for solving the nation’s grand challenges.”

Cray’s work was used in physics research and weapons development. One computer he developed was used to simulate nuclear experiments, which helped eliminate the need for physical tests.

The end of the Cold War, however, diminished the demand for the massive machines. Also, advances in computer technology were allowing smaller computers to reach the processing speeds of supercomputers.

That meant tough times for Cray. In 1995 he was forced to close the doors of his 6-year-old Cray Computer Corp. after the Cray-4, which cost about $360 million to build, failed to entice a single buyer.

Undaunted, in August he opened SRC Computer Inc., a Colorado Springs-based company that employed five. The mission, simply, was to “build computers.”

Cray began his career at Control Data Corp. in the late 1950s, developing one of the first computers to use radio transistors instead of vacuum tubes, which weighed tons and sapped huge amounts of electricity. The transistors allowed for the miniaturization of components.

Cray also invented RISC, Reduced Instruction Set Computing, a technology that allows desktop computers to process tasks more quickly.

In 1972, Cray left CDC and founded Cray Research Inc. in Eagan, Minn., where, four years later, he unveiled the Cray-1 supercomputer. It was 10 times faster and more powerful than any machine on the market.