The Seymour Cray Era: A Review of Supercomputing's Genesis

2025-06-12

Boelie Elzen and Donald MacKenzie's "The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes" chronicles the roughly three-decade reign of Seymour Cray in the supercomputing world. The book details the development of key supercomputer models, the technical choices and compromises involved, and the evolving market landscape, culminating in SGI's acquisition of Cray's assets and the shift towards massively parallel processing. It highlights the early divergence between business and scientific computing, showcasing Cray's challenge to IBM's dominance with the CDC 6600. The narrative explores technological risks, the crucial role of software support, and the diverse applications of supercomputers across various industries. While lacking in personal anecdotes and aesthetic considerations, the book offers valuable insights into the history of scientific computing, computer architecture, and high-value/low-volume business strategies.

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Tech

MacPaint Source Code: A Deep Dive into a 128KB Painting Revolution

2025-04-05

This article delves into the source code of MacPaint, a groundbreaking painting program released in 1984 alongside the original Macintosh. It revolutionized personal computing by introducing intuitive mouse-driven controls and innovative features. The analysis covers MacPaint's algorithms, code architecture, and performance optimizations, highlighting clever techniques leveraging the 68k platform, such as efficient buffer management and a seed-fill algorithm. The article also explores MacPaint's impact on digital graphics and the competitive landscape it faced.

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Development Graphics Programming

Programming Lewis Carroll's *Memoria Technica*

2024-12-27

This article explores Lewis Carroll's *Memoria Technica*, a cipher he devised to aid in remembering numbers. The cipher maps consonants to digits, ignoring vowels and punctuation. The article describes the cipher's mechanics, presents online tools for encoding and decoding, and discusses its potential use in steganography. The authors detail their TypeScript implementation, highlighting optimizations for efficiency. Examples illustrate encoding and decoding, and the article analyzes the cipher's strengths and weaknesses as a steganographic technique, including a potential vulnerability related to letter and digit frequency discrepancies.

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Development Steganography