When I was a kid in the early 90s, a nearby university had a Cray 1. We went on field trip to see it. IIRC, they got it because some oil company had gotten a better supercomputer and didn't need it anymore, so it was probably originally purchased sometime in the 80s or earlier.

Also a quick search found this from 1985: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400...:

> Supercomputers are becoming a useful and important tool in the finding and developing of oil and gas reserves. Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry involve two important aspects: enormous computational power and massive data management. Vector computers are being used in petroleum engineering to simulate the flow of oil and gas in a reservoir, the faster performance of the vector machines making many, heretofore, unmanageable calculations possible. In exploration for oil and gas, supercomputers are being used to store, classify, and interpret huge amounts of geophysical seismic data.

Funny, I just found that link myself. I guess it makes sense, there was data and there was a need to comb through it. Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data.

"Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data"

And since we are visual beings, managing large amounts of data is best done in a graphical way. But it is not easy to do that right. You can create super beautiful looking, but total missleading visualisations.

My father worked in the sugar industry, his first computer came with an operator :)

When Fairchild got out of the computing business (84/85 ish) it was the huge oilfield services company Schlumberger that bought the AI lab run by Marty Tenenbaum. IIRC S had some Crays and a Connection Machine. Schlumberger Palo Alto was across the street (other side of Foothill Expwy) from PARC. IIRC they had a lot of interesting visualization work; I turned them down (despite their excellent research staff) for PARC because I wanted to work on theory of computation.