Cray Super Computers and Smartphones.

Cray-1 (1978) versus iPhone13 (2022

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In 1978 I was a teenager with a strong interest in technology and enamored with the elegance of the Cray supercomputers.  Cray Research, under the founder Seymour Cray, became something of a national champion in a race between the US, the Soviet Union and the Japanese as to who could produce the fastest supercomputer.  

The Soviet Union participation in this race was always shrouded in mystery and could only be speculated.  Through the seventies, as the computers became ever more powerful, the refinement of exactly what were the best measures of the performance of a supercomputer became more and more nuanced. 

And they were also simply beautiful machines, evincing an aesthetic not seen till later with Jobs' Apple.   

By the eighties, Cray began to slip from the race, not so much failing as being overtaken by a broader array of computers assessed across a wider array of performance.  Of course the minicomputer (i.e. personal computers) muddied the waters still further. 

This video is a brilliant reminder of a former star overtaken by the inexorable power of Moore's Law.   

In 1973, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke formulated his third law.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Dave Darling illustrates Clarke's Third Law by observing that a 2024 smartphone, transported back to 1978 and compared to a Cray Super Computer back then would have seemed magic.

The present is always a bubbling incipient phase change into the future.  In 1978, fiction writers could imagine the capabilities of an imaginary device like a 2024 smartphone but there was no way to envisage an engineering path to that future.  It would emerge in its own fashion in fits and starts.  There is a simmering magic of our slow but astonishing creation of a new emergent order.