Born on 28 September 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, Seymour Cray was an electrical engineer who became known as the father of supercomputing. After attending the University of Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1950 and a master’s in mathematics in 1951, Cray went to work for Engineering Research Associates in St Paul, Minnesota. When the scientific computing division was phased out in 1957, Cray left with several other employees to form Control Data Corp (CDC), where he concentrated on building large scientific computers and simplifying their design. Cray served as the primary engineer on the innovative CDC 1604. Introduced in 1959, it was the world’s fastest computer at the time and one of the first to use transistors rather than vacuum tubes. Cray went on to design the world’s first supercomputer—the CDC 6600—in 1964. The CDC 6600 was also the first commercial computer to use a cathode-ray-tube (CRT) console. In 1972 Cray left CDC to found his own company, Cray Research, which became the leading manufacturer of supercomputers, such as the Cray 1 developed in 1976. The Cray 1’s innovations included vector processing and integrated circuits. Cray continued over the next two decades to pursue ultra-high-speed supercomputing technologies and founded two more companies, Cray Computer Corp in 1989 and SRC Computers in 1996, both in Colorado Springs. He died at age 71 in 1996, from injuries sustained in a car crash. Cray was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997. (Photo credit: Michael Hicks, CC BY 2.0)
