Seymour Cray - CRAY Supercomputer (USA)
Seymour Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who is widely credited with creating the world's first supercomputer. He was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin and attended the University of Minnesota, where he earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1949 and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics in 1950. Cray went on to work for Engineering Research Associates, who were pioneers in the development of computers, and later for Control Data Corporation, where he designed the CDC 1604, the first commercially successful transistor-based computer. In 1972, Cray founded Cray Research Inc. and developed the Cray-1, the world's first supercomputer. The Cray-1 was a revolutionary design for its time and was used for a variety of scientific and industrial problems. In the 1980s, Cray developed the Cray X-MP and Cray-2, which were even faster and more powerful than the Cray-1. Cray worked on several other supercomputer designs before his death in 1996. He died in an automobile accident near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where he was born. He was 71 years old.