Howard Sachs recollection working in Colorado Springs 1979 - 1982
He was one of the highlights of our industry and I was very lucky to know and work with him.
I learned a tremendous amount from him and was very appreciative of the opportunity. We spent most of the time talking about architectures and software. A significant amount of time was spent discussing the depth of pipelining and vector register startup times.
His style as the project manager was to ask different people to design sections of the machine. They had little direction and were allowed to have a lot of freedom, ...
Notes:
These are my updated notes and still not organized in any particular fashion, just ramblings of my recollections with Seymour. He was one of the highlights of our industry and I was very lucky to know and work with him.
I went to Cray in 1979 and was Vice President in charge of the hardware development for Cray Labs in Boulder Colorado. The lab was closed in the summer of 1982. At that time Seymour was in control of Cray Research as CEO I think, and John Rollwagen was President. Stuart Patterson was president of Cray Laboratories reporting to the Board of Directors of Cray Research, and I reported to Stuart in charge of hardware development. After about a year there was a falling out between Rollwagen and both Seymour and my boss Stuart Patterson. The issue was largely over budgets and as a result Seymour resigned from Cray Research and formed Cray Computer. One of the more important issues was that Cray Research had first right of refusal on all computers that Seymour designed.
My first experience with Seymour was my initial interview. We had a great conversation regarding mostly packaging technologies and cooling. We got into a fairly heated argument of some issue, I just don't remember, but I was impressed with the fact that he seemed to enjoy the argument. After that we had many good spirited discussions.
He worked most of the time at his home and came in to the office about10:00 AM and left at lunch. I met with him monthly at the Haley (sp.) Labs at about 10:00 AM and then we went to lunch and I went back to Boulder and he went home. This was my view, check with others to see if this was his normal habit. This was set up so I could ask questions and learn from him. I learned a tremendous amount from him and was very appreciative of the opportunity. We spent most of the time talking about architectures and software. A significant amount of time was spent discussing the depth of pipelining and vector register startup times.
His style as the project manager was to ask different people to design sections of the machine. They had little direction and were allowed to have a lot of freedom, when they were done they submitted their logic equations to Seymour and he usually never spoke to them about it again. You never knew if he used your logic until the machine was complete. His top logician was Harry Runkle, unfortunately deceased for many years. Harry had a hard time with the lack of feedback, but was a very good guy and put up with it.