April 2025 Update:
Unfortunately, our computer science gallery is not on display at the moment. Our museum is undergoing a large renovation, and we already re-opened the first part with 19 new galleries in 2022.
But the second half of the building will be under construction for at least 5 more years. Therefore Cray-1 has to stay in our depots.
This large technical museum is located in the Bavarian city of Munich with other beaches elsewhere. Of particular interest is this fine Cray 1 Example SN26. Check with the museum as this exhibit is not currently on display in 2025.
Serial 26 was in service first at EDF – CISI in France then Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany before arriving at the museum in 1981.
From the Museum Site
Inventory No. 1988-112
Classification: 422.07.05 Program Control and General-Purpose Computers / Digital Computer Systems / Computers with Integrated Semiconductor Technology
Description
The first CRAY-1 high-speed computer was installed in 1976. From 1979 onwards, the CRAY-1 S version, the most widely used to date, was deployed, with 38 installed units.
The computer is word-oriented, with 64-bit words, and has a clock speed of 12.5 nanoseconds. Due to the special structure of the processor and the coordinated instruction sequence (known as pipelining), the clock speed is also the execution time for addition, subtraction, and multiplication, so that 80 million of these operations are performed per second. Division with full precision requires 40 nanoseconds. The semiconductor main memory of the computer on display has a capacity of one million words; the maximum expansion level was four million words.
The motivation for the development of the CRAY-1 was cryptanalytic tasks. The “codebreaker version” contains circuit boards that were removed from the model on display because the US government had concerns.
