Seymour Cray

Cray devoted his entire career to the design of large-scale computer equipment. In 1957, he helped found Control Data Corp. He was responsible for the design of that company's most successful large-scale computers: the CDC 1604, the CDC 6600, and the CDC 7000. In 1972, Cray founded Cray Research to design and build the highest-performance, general-purpose supercomputers, notably the Cray-1, which established a new standard in supercomputing in 1976. In 1981, Cray relinquished his position as chairman of the board to devote himself full-time to the design of the Cray-2, which was introduced in 1985. Cray invented of a number of large-scale computer technologies, including the Cray-1 vector register technology, the cooling techniques for the Cray-2, the CDC 6000 freon-based cooling system, and a magnetic amplifier for ERA.