What were the code names rain, gust, drizzle, cyclone etc ?
Up to about 1994 the computers in the Cray Research, Eagan and Chippewa Falls, machines rooms in were known by their serial numbers. For manufacturing this was fine but for the Eagan centre it was a pain as computers were replaced and upgraded on a reasonably regular basis. CCN in Eagan was more interested in running compute environments so it was decided that each type compute platform benchmarking, filestore, batch engine etc. would have an environment name instead. This meant that “Rain” as a compute platform started out as a YMP8e but later transparently changed into a C90 with less disruption to the end users. The exception to this was USS the Data Migration file server that was always called USS. The biggest machines in Eagan were interconnected by very high speed networking, HYPER channel in the early days, and later (@1994) 200MB/s HIPPI connections.
