Slide 72 of 89
Notes:
As a person he was extremely organized, everything was in it's place on his desk at work or in the office in his home. It was interesting that, although he was extremely well organized I don't recall any schedules for projects. He personally took care of training ladies to adjust the length of traces on the printed circuit boards to be the same length, thereby avoiding races. Ladies that had little or no experience did this.
Seymour got married (I think in 1980). My wife (Gail) and I went to dinner one evening with Seymour and his fiancée at the time, and found her to be very charming and outgoing. I recall Seymour got a very expensive bottle of red wine, Chateau Lafite Rothchild approx. $100 per bottle. So I think he must have been interested in wine, perhaps because Rothchild was an investor in Cray and he usually got a case each year as a gift from Rothchild.
Most of us logicians and architects in Boulder all studied the logic for the Cray 1 and found his work to be simple but not obvious. It took a lot of effort to understand some of the features of his logic. Some designs still stick in my mind, his adders were very fast and different, although now the techniques are in all the textbooks and very common. The way he swapped context was quite interesting; the register files were all dual ported so that all the registers could be moving at the same time.
Seymour was a great architect, logician, and packaging engineer but did not understand circuit design or semiconductor technology. During the 60's and70's most of the architects had strong logic design backgrounds. I recall that most of the architects of that time were weak in circuit design and since VLSI was not mature, the architects of the day were generally not experienced with these new capabilities.
