What a great video. You covered all the key points in 7 minutes which I guess is appropriate when talking about supercomputers. Just a couple of things to add from a European viewpoint. First Seymour was a real Gentleman and immaculately dresses. I had a "power-breakfast" with and his then new President John Rollwagon at a hotel in London. We talked about setting up a new Sales Operation for Europe. I think together we could have kick-started a new era of supercomputing across Europe because I already had a list of potential customers. As it was he and John were seduced by "big talk" from ICL and later Fujitsu and anybody who is following the 2024 Horizon UK Post Office scandal investigation going on now will see why that was doomed from the start. There were actually three Cray deals confirmed but I set those deals up through "back channels". (R.I.P. MB and thanks DT). In Europe the Politicians are less interested in the advance of science than protecting their own commercial and academic organisations. If you checkout just how vapid talking shops like TERENA and GEANT are you can see the problem. That means Scientists just don't have the computing tools they need to explore new frontiers. In USA it's a totally different "Ball Game". That was Seymore's home ground (literally when you think about how much he loved Chippewa Falls). He had Politicians offering him guaranteed Federal funds to build anything he could dream up as long as it was fast. His special team had a Lab in the middle of the forest. They had water scooters for fun on the lakes, a great Barbeque and the whole feeling was "Making fast computers is exciting and should be fun". When super secret visitors where entertained the whole thing was totally honest and new innovations were revealed almost like a magician in a Theatre. That USA approach whether its Government or Billionaires is still alive and well. It is the new home of Advanced Science and let's hope there are Leaders who start to push more money into projects like Climate change and Global Wellbeing rather than new ways to kill people. That would certainly be Seymore's attitude because in his few resting moments he was a lover of the Natural World and the magic of the forest. Party on
I remember you well! Sorry to hear the PLF are still active, you all were a menace. But, a menace that made the server interesting. I like how these videos have turned from entertainment to time capsules, it was a great time. Arma 4 coming soon TM
Worked for Cray; went to Chippewa Falls many times in meetings with Lester Davis (VP of Engineering- built all of Seymour's machines) and Steve Chen- designed the Cray XMP and YMP. Thanks for memories!
"... a devoted fan of Star Trek, a 1960s television show about space travel..." reminds me of Trading Places, "... and bacon, such as you might find on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich."
I had the BBC and followed Arm all through my electronic career, never bought one (until the RP). I looked at Arm for home based consumer tech and it wasn't competitive at the time (late 90s early 00s I think). We were looking at building digital recording for analogue TV signals, prior to DTV broadcast. Most stuff was running off ST processors with built in MPEG decode hardware, the arm could do it in SW, but still needed a hardware chip to do encoding. It was only with mobile electronics it really hit home with its low power consumption. That was really an accident by Acorn because they were just looking to save money on the package and go with plastic. The last company I worked for did security camera design and the market leader for low power was gopro (arm based). They wouldn't license and we had to use a more standard Arm part and suffer the increased power dissipation in the camera, this reduces the life and increases complexity and size. Processing efficiency is now a massive part of the game. The more processing and less heat you can put into a camera the more features it can have like object recognition, left objects, people tracking etc.
A good and well made presentation with rare pictures. Allow me to suggest that you split it into two parts, about 18 to 20 minutes total, in order to slow down your "insanely" fast narration which really takes down the value of your project. Try to slow down and breath as fast speed can be interpreted as "shallowness". Dwell with your words a bit and pause at the end of the line,. Try to make the story more valuable by focusing on thematic depth rather than packing the story within a fixed time frame. You have the idea and how to present it, and work with the style and character of the program. Thank you from Oslo, and please continue your works.
The A4000 is the first step in what makes modern computers boring and uninteresting. The ARM is great but the ARM250 is a soulless chip. SoC is where computing became a "black box" for the consumer. For me. its the actual line in the sand where computing became uninteresting.
I used to write for Arc World and Acorn User -. I loved the BBC micro and onwards. I'm looking foir the start up flute like bong of my first A305. Has anyone got it ? The first Aurtur upgrade lost the bong sadly. It was magic !
i had one or three of them, i ran computer clubs back in the day and we compared it to the Amiga, ST etc,,, pitty about it.. the british have lost its ability to own it IP.. We are far too willing to sell up and hand it over to investors.. Of course, it not owned by the british any more, and it may never will. There is a hope in the open source RISC, but I fear that it will either die die to lack of investment, or bought by the mega corps... and crippled..
Everyone’s now moved to some form of ARM even for desktops. Basically their predictions were all proven to be correct. That as machines became smaller and or portable low power processors would rule. Also because they produce less heat and can theoretically scale up better they were always sooner or later going to displace Intel which did the opposite. They were power hungry, produced immense heat and as it’s now turning out don’t scale up well.
I’’m glad you did this, thanks! By the way, “Chippewa” is at Native American word and rhymes with the Xmas carol “‘tis the season to be jolly fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la “
We had the a4000 at school back in early 2000. I finished secondary school in 2005 and they was replaced shortly before i left. I remember putting my hand on the monitor and ZAPPING my mates with the other 😂.
The Archimedes was an inportant step sure, but IMO it was not what really got things going in personal computer ownership. For that, I think you have to go back to simpler machines like the Science of Cambridge MK14 and the original Sinclair computer to find the true beginnings. It was those machines that proved that there was a market for personally owned computers (however primitive). Look at a video here on RU-vid "Chris Curry talks about Clive Sinclair" to hear about the steps that led up to the BBC Micro, Archimedes and the others.
Ace video! Never heard of? I remember the Archimedes very well - especially Zarch and the Lander demo. One of my schoolmates said that if he had one, he'd have permanently bunked off school and stayed at home programming it instead. :D
Cray was a genius and built several of the fastest machines in history (for their time obviously). I recommend the book The Supermen about his life and work.
Well, the worlds population of primates is around 7.5 billion, so that ca. 15 billion arms. By now there are 180 billion ARMs. That's 12 times as many ARMs as arms.
Great video, I'm sitting watching it with my Acorn A4000 set up on the desk next to me. I rescued it when I was at school, it was getting thrown out because it had been replaced with a classroom full of shiny new Siemens PCs. All these years later it's still working well, now with flash based storage.
Similar story here. I've got three Risc PCs under my desk, including a two slicer! I bought a 3010 when I was in University in 92. Damn, the things I did on that machine. Wonderful.
When I worked for DEC, we installed TWO of our then supercomputers just to LOAD data as a front-end, to a CRAY1. Very Star-Trek like, great design. Fantastic story!
