Stories about the late Seymour Cray, 71, can be found on . One, which Tim Finin forwarded to me from Francis Lee on EvangeList, tells how Steve Jobs was Cray's first and only walk-in customer. It's said that Jobs showed up unannounced at Cray headquarters in Mendota Heights, MN, and asked about buying a Cray. He did get one, for designing the next generation of Macintosh. Cray said that seemed reasonable, since he was using a Macintosh to design the next Cray!

Another reminiscence is of Cray's first job after college. An engineer there taught him to use intuition prior to computation. "I thought, 'Wow, here's something new.' So I put away my circular slide rule, and after that I used intuition." [Washington Post, 10/5/96. EDUPAGE.]

-- Ken