Abstract
Cray was the penultimate "tall, thin man"*. I viewed him as being the greatest computer builder that I knew of as demonstrated by his designs and their successors that operated at the highest performance for over 30 years. His influence on computing has been enormous and included: circuitry, packaging, plumbing (the flow of heat and bits), architecture, parallelism, and compilers to exploit parallelism.
*Carver Mead: “one who works at every level of integration from circuits to application software”