What was the Cray connection with Apple ?
Cray and Apple, seemly at opposite ends of the computer spectrum, do have some subtle links. It was known that Seymour Cray used an Apple desktop some of the time when designing the Cray-2. It is also known that Apple had a sequence of Cray machines starting in March 1986 with an XMP/28 followed by another XMP in Feb 1991. A YMP-2E arrived later in 1991 and finally an EL from Dec 1993 to Jun 98. It is said that Apple’s first XMP was bought by Steve Jobs after he just walked into the Cray facility in Mendota Hights. Originally purchased to help out on a computer on a chip project, the machines eventually earned their keep running MOLDFLOW an injection plastic modelling program ( producing some results in the form of Quicktime movies) and later as a file server. Other applications were CFD codes for disk drive design improvement and one source reports “.. they sometimes ran the first XMP as a single user MacOS emulator … They had a frame buffer and a mouse hooked up to the IOP.” What i
