[rescue] wild far-out theory.

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On February 7, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> > As my advisor says, they were right... because IBM is still in bidness and
> > CRAY is no more...
> 
>   I'm so flabbergasted by this that I have to reply a second time.
> 
>   Your advisor doesn't really think that Cray was trying to compete
> with IBM, does he?  If so, it really proves the whole "those who can,
> do...those who can't, teach!" saying.
> 
>   Christ, what a moron.  No offense to you, of course, Francisco..

Chill dude!

He is perfectly aware of that... clearly you did not get the irony. Cray
as Cray Research Incorporated (CRI), or Cray Computer Corporation (CCC)
exist no more. However the company formely known as TERA bought CRAY,
pretty much for the name (not for the technology clearly, the only lineup
leftover were the SVs but that is because they get the huge gov
subsidies). I have friends who used to work there, and they refer to that
company as TERA... The main reason my advisor considers CRAY to be dead is
that when we got offers from them for the new bioinformatics cluster,
instead of pushing the T3, they wanted us to consider their 
Rack'o'DELLs... so we got the impression that the t3 will soon EOL'd.

My advisor has no saying in whether IBM was afraid of CRAY. He just showed
me the manual as a historic piece, specially since it has the IBM's memo
attached to it. So no reason to call him names :-), plus the whole comment
was taken out of context I guess. His point is that if you look at the
top500 list today, it is kind of scary how IBM has over 4 times more share
than CRAY!

However you also forgot that IBM was not, an is not, just a mainframe,
bidnes oriented company. They actually have a relatively significant
scientific customer base, and that is what the memo kind of addresses.
That is why IBM was intrigued about the CRAY-1 when it first came out.
Besides they did not care that much about the actual machine, but rather
what was inside the shell, i.e. the ideas implemented. Were the
technologies been deployed in the fabrication of the cray a threat to
IBM's? What was the state of IBMs internal research compared to CRAY's,
etc...