This is part of IEEE Spectrum's Special Report: 25 Microchips That Shook the World.

Image: Cray

Cray Research Cray-1 CPU (1976)

Seymour Cray liked to build powerful computers. He also liked to build beautiful computers. The Cray-1, with its stylized chassis arranged in the shape of a C (as in Cray —get it?), came out in 1976. It might as well have come from the future. Wired by hand, Freon-cooled, a padded seat circling the chassis. In its guts resided tight piles of circuit boards, each crammed with up to 144 chips—memory chips and high-speed logic chips. So the Cray-1 had no microprocessors; instead, the whole machine acted as one 5-metric-ton processor. With 64-bit registers, it ran at 80 megahertz and crunched numbers using a technique called vector processing. Basically, the logic chips fetched long strings of numbers (vectors) from memory and computed them all at once. The C shape actually helped keep wires short and was thus a critical aspect of the high-speed design. The first Cray-1—80 megaflops, 8 megabytes of main memory—went to Los Alamos National Laboratory. It cost US $8.8 million, at a time when a million bucks was real money. Cray pioneered the field of supercomputing, but as a business the company enjoyed mixed results. In the 1980s, the high-performance computing market was dominated by massively parallel machines, which were less expensive and more flexible than Cray’s. They just didn’t look as good as a Cray.