June 9, 1986: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center opens
1986 – The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center opens. It links 5 supercomputer centers together – Princeton, San Diego, Illinois, and Cornell University. PSC is a leading partner in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure program.
1985 – The Cray X-mp/48 Supercomputer begins operation in San Diego Supercomputer Center in California. The $15 million dollar supercomputer could process 400 megaflops (200 per processor). It was a shared-memory parallel vector processor and supported 2 or 4 million 64-bit words of main memory in 16 or 32 banks.
The first Cray didn’t get installed until October 1986.
Cray X-MP/48 replaced the Cray-1. It was succeeded by the Cray Y-MP8/864 in 1990.
Movies such as “the Last Starfighter” were rendered using the Cray Supercomputer.
2000 – The Playstation 2 was released in Japan to rival Sega’s Dreamcast system and Nintendo Game Cube. The Playstation 2 had an “Emotion Engine” processor at 294 MHz (later 299 MHz with 128 bit capabilities), 32 MB RAMBUS memory, Graphics synth at 147 MHz, USB 1.1, Ethernet connection and 2 memory card slots which could accept up to 8 MB cards.
The Sony Playstation 2 didn’t hit the US market until October, 2000. Some say PS2 caused Dreamcast to falter and eventually close down. Many believed this was because the PS2 was backwards compatible with games from the original Playstation.
Sony’s game console sat unopposed for 6 months after Dreamcast stopped production. That is, until Nintendo released the Game Cube and Microsoft released XBox.
1985 – The Cray X-mp/48 Supercomputer begins operation in San Diego Supercomputer Center in California. The $15 million dollar supercomputer could process 400 megaflops (200 per processor). It was a shared-memory parallel vector processor and supported 2 or 4 million 64-bit words of main memory in 16 or 32 banks.
The first Cray didn’t get installed until October 1986.
Cray X-MP/48 replaced the Cray-1. It was succeeded by the Cray Y-MP8/864 in 1990.
Movies such as “the Last Starfighter” were rendered using the Cray Supercomputer.
This Day in Tech History podcast show notes for December 4
June 9, 1986: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center opens
1986 – The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center opens. It links 5 supercomputer centers together – Princeton, San Diego, Illinois, and Cornell University. PSC is a leading partner in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure program.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 9
2000 – The Playstation 2 was released in Japan to rival Sega’s Dreamcast system and Nintendo Game Cube. The Playstation 2 had an “Emotion Engine” processor at 294 MHz (later 299 MHz with 128 bit capabilities), 32 MB RAMBUS memory, Graphics synth at 147 MHz, USB 1.1, Ethernet connection and 2 memory card slots which could accept up to 8 MB cards.
The Sony Playstation 2 didn’t hit the US market until October, 2000. Some say PS2 caused Dreamcast to falter and eventually close down. Many believed this was because the PS2 was backwards compatible with games from the original Playstation.
Sony’s game console sat unopposed for 6 months after Dreamcast stopped production. That is, until Nintendo released the Game Cube and Microsoft released XBox.
1956 – An Wang patented Ferrite Core Memory on May 17, 1955. However, IBM used Ferrite cores in their systems and the patent issue started an interesting legal battle. One that ended in IBM purchasing the patent outright for “Several million dollars”. Wang took the funds to build up Wang Laboratories.