Eastburn wrote
I have sat on a Cray - stood around many others.
Even bought one for my department - and ordered 2 dozen disks in
six-packs to fill up a cache of storage.
^^^^^

well technically until the CRI T3 designs (which were not Seymour
designs anyways T3Ds and T3Es), Cray never had a cache.
Cray himself apparently didn't know how to design an effective cache.
The 2 and the 3 which he did design had local memories which replaced
2 banks of registers which got put back into the 4.
So a cache can be cited as a community joke (cache? what cache?).
If you can't afford a complete memory of the same technology as the
cache, a client had no business buying one of his machines.



Barry Jarrett wrote:
please learn to edit subject fields when changing topics
fyi, the national security agency has a museum, open to the public,
just outside the ft. meade facility along the washington-baltimore
parkway.

The exit coming from DC is under construction, be warned.

Allow at least 2 hours if you are into detailed viewing.
Think twice about putting your thumb on the biometric sensor.
If the library is open, and you are really into historic documents,
you could be there all day.

Nice small museum, various historic machines, pieces of the Power's U-2
from Moscow, the flag from the USS Liberty, a replicated bug in a US seal,
and other things. Best to read the Codebreakers and Bamford's two books
before visiting to get the full impact of a visit. Nice small gift store
(the warning they give: beware eBay-ers pawning off their artifacts at
inflated prices (some of which are given away for free by the Museum)).

they have several (a dozen?) enigma machines of various
configurations, and a bombe, along with lots and lots of other
interesting stuff (wanna have a sit-down on a cray 1?).

Well technically, it's not a Cray 1. It was kind of a Cray-1M for a
while and what is there now is designated an X-MP:

S/N 115/102 National Cryptologic Museum (Ft. Meade) actually Cray X-MP
http://www.nsa.gov/museum/cray.html