Saturday, 16 September 2023

Building a Lego Supercomputer - The Cray-1 - Part 1

Having worked in computing and technology for over 30 years, I've noticed that some names come up more often in computing history than others.  One of those names is Cray.  Cray Research Inc was originally founded in 1972 by Seymour Cray, but it was the probably the creation of the Cray1 Supercomputer in 1976 that caused the Cray name to become part of computing history.

Image of Cray-1 In the Science Museum London - From Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1

I'd been looking at smooth sided cylindrical and conical Lego models for a while now - Smooth sided cylindrical Lego models are quite difficult to get right - The Lego Saturn V model is a great example of when it works well.   And smooth sided conical models I've found even more difficult!  So building a
Cray-1 with it's cylindrical towers and seating seemed like a good fit for a new Lego model build.

Building an initial representation of single "Cray-1 Unit" ie. the seat and tower, was relatively straight-forward


However I quickly realised that the remainder of the model would not be that easy!