Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Cray to design Mac (was 6502 *IS* RISC)
Message-ID: <14042@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 7 Oct 90 07:50:40 GMT
References: <0093DC22243C5940.00000110@dcs.simpact.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 17

In article <0093DC22243C5940.00000110@dcs.simpact.com> whitewolf@gnh-starport.cts.com (Tae Song) writes:
>Apple use Cray to make better Mac IIs, and Cray used Mac IIs to build better
>Crays.

I wonder how Seymour was able to use a machine that hadn't been produced yet.

It is probably the case that Seymour would have used a Macintosh (but not a
Mac II at the time).  His Cray operating systems were excessively unfriendly.
They've improved somewhat, but UniCOS does still contain some gratuitous
deviations from standard UNIX.  There are very few applications for which a
Cray mainframe is cost-effective; most software (and hardware) development
work would be better done on a supermini such as SGI, Alliant, Sequent,
Convex, et. al.  The main use I have for the two Crays we have here (an
X-MP/48 and a Cray-2) is to use their ANSI C implementation to check source
code for portability problems (both involving __STDC__-specific usage and
for verifying that 64-bit integral representations do not cause problems).
There are of course users who believe that they really do require a Cray...