https://cdn.britannica.com/11/23611-050-81E61C8A/Cray-1-supe...

So happy to be able to find a picture of the wirewrap inside: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e2/d2/47/e2d2...

One was seeing their Cray. I forget which specific model it was. It was gray and mauve, and had the fountain with the logo on the unit that pumped the coolant. Monsanto had a dedicated computer room for it with glass walls so you could see it. The overall effect was to make a very strong impression that this was something very special.

Another thing that stuck in my mind was seeing their bio labs. These were long concrete hallways dug halfway into the ground, I assume to make climate control easier. They had row upon row of corn plans under artificial light. These were the labs that developed roundup ready seed. I had no idea at the time the significance of what I was seeing or how contentious it would be now.

Last thing I'll mention is when we were walking outside and he pointed out the separate building the CEO et all worked out of. It was literally a bunker with earthen birms and such around it. My grandpa bragged that it was built to be bombproof in case terrorists attacked the CEO. At the time I was somewhat mystified why anyone would bomb the CEO of a chemical company. I certainly understand why now.

But anyhow, it was a cool experience and seeing that Cray probably helped inspire my interest in learning to program later.

Edit:

Random other thing I'll mention is an email exchange from a mailing list back in the late 90s that focused on APL style languages. Someone told their story about how back during Cray's glory days they worked in a lab where he did interactive APL programming on a Cray machine. I can only imagine what that must have felt like at the time, typing arcane terse syntax into a prompt that would execute them shockingly fast.

As for APL, I haven't really got past an orientation in the language but it's held a total mystique to me since seeing this video circa 1975 [0] walking through the language with a Selectric teletype acting as a REPL, totally flipped my understanding of computer history, I assumed it was all punchcard programming back in the old black and white days xD (I am born 1990 for reference, trying to catch up with what happened before me)

[0] (30min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DTpQ4Kk2wA

Bring back the impractical, space-eating circular design! I don't care about space efficiency. It's supposed to look cool.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6F80/production/...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53147684

And they do have a snazzy coloured endcap...

https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/spVSO7_2vryY6neSXK1JfQ--~B...

https://www.engadget.com/japan-fugaku-supercomputer-01312169...

Well, a bunch of racks with green LEDs is more practical, cheap and functional, I guess.

I imagine there have been multiple cycles through the spectrum since then…

Tuning the band gap with a new material back then was difficult I think.

⸻⸻⸻

1. It was on loan to the Computer History Museum from Myhrvold and returned to him in 2016. It's unclear whether he did re-loan it or if he's busily calculating the values of polynomials with it.² The Computer History Museum website makes it sound like it's currently on display but I can find no news stories about it going back to the museum.

2. Just kidding about him calculating polynomials—it's (I think) on display in the lobby of Intellectual Ventures.

Maybe in 30 ~ 50 years or so.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207:3-5...

[0] https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CeZjXUH6Y8ZvfcS0IM0MWoLNAYJ...

Related, the DEC PDPs certainly look stylish!

I wonder if we measure it more precisely we'll get to something closer to 1.4142135623730950488...

Liquid Nitrogen with pumping: 40 K for a few thousand dollars.

Run of the mill Liquid Helium: 4 K for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But for these devices you need 15mK which is reachable only if you mix two different isotopes of Helium and pump the mixture into vacuum. Such a device is up to 1M$ and more.

And the insides of that device are in vacuum (actually, air freezing into ice on top of the chip can be a problem). The brass is basically the heat conductor between the chip and the cold side of your pumped He mixture (which is *not* just sloshing inside the whole body of the cryostat where the chips are).

Another reason you do not want the He sloshing around is because you will be opening this to make changes to the device and do not want all the extremely expensive He3 (the special isotope you need for the mixture) to be lost.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration#Nuclear...

Or, look at literature on error rates for people performing simple repetitive tasks.

That said the whole hovering in free space thing was perhaps a bit over the top in the show.

https://qz.com/1826093/devs-creator-alex-garland-describes-t...

They mostly hang like that since most dil units are designed so the coldest part is usually the lowest, and they’re generally orientation sensitive. You want easy access to the bottom part, so you just put the plates in descending order of temperature and you hang the thing from the ceiling.

I searched, but couldn't find it.

Also - when LISP was invented (1958) - what was the state of computers at the time? Doing some research - it seems like direct keyboard input to computers was only available for 2 years prior. It seems like languages were decades ahead of hardware.

I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive.

Are there any articles on the process for how LISP was designed and implemented??

My intuition is that back then getting run time on computers was so scarce that the best programmers and mathematicians spent a great deal of brain time considering exactly what their software should be. If you only get one run a day, if that, you're gonna do your best to make it count. Today we're often in the opposite situation, where it can be entirely rational to burn incredible amounts of computation in the absolute sense to save brain time.

I have a much bigger emotional conflict when contrasting that with the current state of mainstream programming languages, that are only just beginning to tread onto territories like algebraic data types and pattern matching that ML paved almost 50 years ago. Is there any hope for true dependent typing to become popular before 2040?

As for languages ahead of the hardware, you might read up about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the latter a mathematician who translated problems into machine instructions for a machine that wouldn't be built for a hundred years - Babbage's design worked, but he spent all the money the Royal Society was willing to give trying improve the tolerances on his logical-clockwork. [3] But anyway, back to John McCarthy's paper, last page:

  APPENDIX - HUMOROUS ANECDOTE

The demonstration was also one of the first to use closed circuit TV in order to spare the spectators the museum feet consequent on crowding around a terminal waiting for something to happen. Thus they were on the fourth floor, and I was in the first floor computer room exercising LISP and speaking into a microphone. The problem chosen was to determine whether a first order differential equation of the form M dx + N dy was exact by testing whether ΔM/Δy = ΔM /Δy, which also involved some primitive algebraic simplification. Everything was going well, if slowly, when suddenly the Flexowriter began to type (at ten characters per second) “THE GARBAGE COLLECTOR HAS BEEN CALLED. SOME INTERESTING STATISTICS ARE AS FOLLOWS:” and on and on and on.

The garbage collector was quite new at the time, we were rather proud of it and curious about it, and our normal output was on a line printer, so it printed a full page every time it was called giving how many words were marked and how many were collected and the size of list space, etc. During a previous rehearsal, the garbage collector hadn’t been called, but we had not refreshed the LISP core image, so we ran out of free storage during the demonstration.

[0] http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704

[3] Jacquard's Web by James Essinger is the book you want to read for more.