Seymour Cray

(1925-1996) Designer of supercomputers, founder of Cray Research, Inc.

• "Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it."
  • Comment on virtual memory

• "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
  • Comment on the use of commodity PC-clusters for supercomputing

• "Parity is for farmers."

• "I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray."
  • Comment on Apple's purchase of a Cray which was intended to help them design the next Mac.

• "Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system."
  • on the importance of memory, bandwidth and throughput.