Cray Research

Cray Research was founded by Seymour Cray after he left Control Data in the early 70s. Their supercomputers were consistantly the fastest in the world until massive clusters of generic microprocessors started to replace traditional vector machines the 90s.

(The RCS has a small Cray in our collection.)

Lisp Machines

Symbolics and Xerox were two important companies in the Lisp Machine world.

Interlisp-D was Xerox's version of lisp, a descendant of BBN Lisp from the 1960s.

(The RCS has many Symbolics systems in our collection.)

Other

The first ethernet standard, 1980.

DataSlice is an application developed at the NCSA ("National Center for Supercomputing Applications") for creating viewable slices of data from the overwelming output generated by supercomputers.

Sun's report on Unix in 1985, and a price list.

SGI

SGI's 3000 series IRIS ("Integrated Raster Imaging System") workstations were 680x0/multibus systems that ran a pre-IRIX version of Unix.

Pipeline was SGI's customer newsletter.

(The RCS has a SGI 3120 in our collection.)

Thinking Machines

CM-2 Manuals

CM-2 Papers

CM-5 Manuals

The Connection Machines were a series of massively parallel supercomputers designed by Thinking Machines Corporation. Their company motto was: "We're building a machine that will be proud of us."

PARIS ("Parallel Instruction Set") is sort of the assembly language for the CM-2. (There are many layers to the CM. "Assembly language" on this machine is an ambiguous term.)

IMP ("Internal Macroinstruction Procedures") allow for something like user-written assembly language extensions.

CMIS ("Connection Machine Instruction Set") is the lowest-level instruction set for manipulating the Connection Machine hardware. This manual contains very detailed information on the CM hardware.

VPS

VPS was a mainframe operating system developed at Boston University that ran their academic computing facilities from the late 70s until the early 90s.