I'm a lifelong learner and invested in helping other people learn about technology. It's one of my motivations for this blog. I recently had a reminder of one of the many people who have helped me along the way. As I was sorting and organizing some of my old letters I found this business card from an engineer at Cray Research. This person spent an hour with me when I was job-shadowing as a High School kid. I don't have permission to share his information, so I'll blur out his name, but in 1991 or 1992 Cray Research cards looked like this...
I grew up in a small town in rural Wisconsin called Elk Mound. It is about 20 miles west from Chippewa Falls where Seymour Cray was from. Cray was in Minnesota for Engineering school and the beginning of his career but after he was established he set up Cray Research back in Chippewa Falls in the 1980s. When I was a kid my high-school guidance counselor knew that I was interested in technology and he arranged for my friend and I to spend a day at Cray Research in Chippewa Falls. There was a general awareness in the community that Cray made super computers but I was not very informed about computing at the time so I didn't realize the importance of Seymour Cray, or what a cutting edge company Cray Research was. The visit did make a big impression on me and helped confirm for me that I wanted to be involved in engineering of some kind.
Seymour moved to Colorado Springs in 1989 so I can not claim that I was even in the same building with him but from what I hear he was a very quiet person and would have probably avoided a tour group anyways. But I did meet an engineer who made an impression, the same engineer whose business card I found just last year. Using LinkedIn, I was able to reconnect with that engineer. He's retired now and he didn't remember our visit, which is understandable since it's a distant memory for me as well, but I still had the opportunity to thank him.
I pursued engineering and my first job out of college was working at one of the Control Data successor companies. One of my favorite memories from my short stint at that company was sitting with some of the older engineers in the lunch room and hearing stories about the early days of computing. I remember being amazed at hearing for the first time how they had memorized the Op Codes for the computers they were working on. Again, I didn't have the context that I have now, but having built a PDP-8 replica and learned a bit more about it I realize that this was not bragging. The machine had no boot ROM so it was mandatory to toggle in the simple loader program if the computer memory was reset. It was so common and important that DEC had it printed on the front panel of the machine.
But, I soon moved on from the Control Data company to the field of Factory Automation which I have been working in ever since. That first job was the last of my loose connections with Seymour Cray and the Cray companies. But I remain committed to the idea of paying it forward, and I continue to welcome opportunities to give young people tours of my workplace. It's exciting to think about where technology will be when these younger folks are my age or retired like the engineer at Cray who spent an hour with me 30 years ago.
Do you have any memories of Cray or the Cray companies? Please leave a comment or feel free to reach out via my email address in my complete profile.
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