Homebrew Cray-1A

This really has been posted here a lot - Well, for those following along at home, this story actually got a relatively recent update - as of this spring, the 1/10-scale Cray-1A is now residing next to its bigger self in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!

Chris Fenton here - someone did actually send me an 80MB 'disk pack' with software, and I was able to modify a super old disk drive to actually read it: http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/ And thanks to some awesome help from others, I was able to actually recover a copy of COS (Cray OS): http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/ Andras Tantos and I have been collaborating on this together for a while now, and he actually has a downloadable Cray X-MP datacenter simulator he wrote, where you…

I remember seeing this about 9 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291 I think at that point, it was still only 33MHz (he now has it running up to 50MHz), it sounds like he's also got a slightly more mature software toolchain now. Oh, and he's added a link to a DOS-compatible Cray simulator, for anyone who wants to play along at home without getting involved with the hardware side.

When I was little, my grandfather worked at NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland. One of my earliest memories is of him taking me, age five, in to see the Cray 1. I remember crawling around on the bench, but of course, that memory could be flawed. Who knows if they would have really let a five year old sit on the fastest supercomputer in the world. Still, that's how I remember it, so I'll stick with my memory. It was…