Mondo Knows Facts

The Cray 1 supercomputer was built in a horseshoe

Seymour Cray's 1976 machine used vector registers and a curved cabinet to shorten the wiring between boards The Cray 1 reached roughly 160 million floating point operations per second at a clock of 80 megahertz, several times faster than any rival. Its C-shaped chassis packed circuit boards close to the power supplies, cutting wire length and signal delay. Liquid coolant ran through the frame, and the machine's distinctive bench seating hid the refrigeration plumbing. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Computer History Museum

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

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Tags: supercomputers, cray, computing-history

The Cray 1 supercomputer was built in a horseshoe: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?
Seymour Cray's 1976 machine used vector registers and a curved cabinet to shorten the wiring between boards. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?
Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?
The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.