Here is a series of articles from the Memorybilia web page
(
http://www.memorybilia.com) about the Cray's Tony Cole bought. Too bad
he's doing what he's doing, but then again, nobody drops $15,000 without
the intention of making it back.
This Cray has had its day
What was once the world's fastest computer is sold by Livermore Lab for
its scrap value
By Tom Abate
EXAMINER TECHNOLOGY WRITER
Call it a symbol of technology obsolescence, or a museum piece, perhaps.
But a Cray1 supercomputer, once the world's fastest computational device,
is now sitting in a South San Francisco warehouse, where it will either be
sold to a collector or get melted down to recover the five tons of copper
and gold inside.
Hayward businessman Tony Cole bought the supercomputer for $10,000 at a
surplus equipment auction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. When
purchased new in the late 1970s, the Cray 1 cost $19,000,000, lab
officials said.
"We got our money's worth out of it," said Derrol Hammer, a purchasing
agent at the lab. "We ran that machine for over 10 years at 24 hours a
day."
But Hammer said it cost more that $35,000 a month to run the Cray 1, a
cylindrical machine that is 7 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, and
requires its own electrical substation to provide it with power.
"A desktop workstation of the Sun type, or a Silicon Graphics workstation
that we can put on a desk, is a Cray 1 equivalent." Hammer said. "You can
buy a workstation for the monthly cost of maintenance" on the Cray 1.
So in 1990 Livermore pulled the plug on the aging supercomputer, and began
asking other government and university labs if they wanted the 10,000
pound digital dinosaur. When no takers surfaced, the lab auction off the
machine in February.
Enter Tony Cole, 29 founder of VIPC Computers, a 10-year-old Hayward firm
that salvages useful components or scrap metals from surplus machines.
Cole offered the highest of seven bids, and drove away on a flat-bed truck
with several tons of supercomputer and associated peripherals.
"We're sure to make our money back on the scrap value of the metal alone,"
Cole said. "There's at least $15,000 worth of gold in that thing."
Because it is an excellent conductor, gold was used to coat the edge
connectors on the more that 1,600 circuits cards that made up the Cray's
innards. Cole said each circuit card also contain about 2 pound of
valuable copper.
But rather than crush the machine for its metals, Cole would like to sell
it intact as a relic or the early supercomputer age. "The Cray system is
the granddaddy of all of them." Cole said. "I would like to sell it to
somebody like Bill Gates or Ross Perot. "It would make a great
center-piece."
But so far the Hayward entrepreneur has had trouble even giving the Cray
away. Gloria Chun Hoo of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose said
Cole had offered to loan the machine to her institution, but the museum
thinks it is too heavy.
"We thought we could put in our lobby," she said. "But occasionally people
have evening receptions here, and we couldn't keep moving it out of the
way."
The Oakland Tribune, Wednesday April 14th. 1993
Lab sells its supercomputer at a bargain-for $10,000
After 10 years or use, the one-time $19 million machine was just too
outdated and costly to keep
By David Berkowitz
STAFF WRITER
Was it colossal government waste or just the price of staying in the
research game?
About 10 years ago, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory paid $19 million for a
Cray-1 supercomputer, then the fastest, most complex computer available in
the world.
In late February, the lab sold that same computer at auction-less a few
key propriety components-for $10,000 to Hayward computer reseller.
Tony Cole, 29, said he bought the machine figuring that at the very least
he could break it down and sell its gold and other metal parts for $16,000
to $20,000.
At best, Cole hopes to deal the 30-ton machine to a technology museum or
some domestic company able to foot the $100,000 to $500,000 tab of
restarting the now-obsolete machine.
Seven parties submitted sealed bids to buy the supercomputer at the
auction, a lab spokeswomen said.
"Normally you can't get hold of one of these, regardless of the age,
because of the nature of it." Said Cole, only the second private citizen
to buy a Cray-1.
Cray Research Inc. installed about 40 Cray-1s between 1976 and 1982, after
which it released the more Cray X-MP and the Cray-2, said Ron Rayome, an
analyst with Cray in San Ramon.
The computer was used to simulate physical events, such as airflow over an
airplane's wing or a missile's casing.
"The thing that made the Cray-1 unique was that it was products that
exhibited a clear superiority to any other previous technology," said Alan
Geller, a sales representative for Cray.
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, deeply entrenched in weapons research
during the Cold War era, considered the supercomputer crucial to its
design efforts.
For the lab, it wasn't a matter of paying $19 million for a machine that
would lose nearly all of its value in 10 years: it was a matter of getting
the most possible use from a top computer for $1.9 million a year, plus
maintenance cost, said Mike May, a former lab director.
"You don't really buy it with the idea of reselling it," said Gary
Dvorchak, an industry analyst with Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco.
"Presumably, they got the full value they were looking for in terms of the
projects they were working on. There are things you can't do without a
supercomputer. That's why they're buying them."
"There's not much choice," agreed Bruce Kelly, a computer scientist at the
lab. "That's the price tag they put on those types of machines. And we
need the machine. They do large scientific calculations, real
number-floating point calculations. They do them very fast, and they can
do a lot of them."
Today, the lab uses newer versions of Cray supercomputer, including the
latest $30 million YMP-C-90, which is 100 times more powerful than the
Cray-1.
The Cray-1 that Cole bought was actually one or two the lab retired to a
warehouse in 1990 because the were outdated and too costly to maintain.
The other was sold three years ago.
Darrol Hammer, a technician who works with supercomputers, said the lab
was paying more than $30,000 a month to keep the Cray-1's running.
Meanwhile, he said many modern desktop computers were able to perform the
same functions as quickly and accurately as the Cray, he said.
"It just does not pay to keep something like that going." Hammer said.
"The power requirements on one of those is incredible."
Computer Currents Volume 10 Number 23, April 20, 1993
NEWS & INDUSTRY
SILICON VALLEY NEWS
"Look Honey, I Bought A Cray 1 Supercomputer!"
Tony Cole of Hayward, California says he is the first individual on record
to own a Cray Model 1 supercomputer. Though the supercomputer doesn't
work, Cole says the gold in it alone could be worth as much as $60,000.
Cole bought the Cray at a government auction held by Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (Livermore, Calif.) in February of this year. Cole
says the Cray can be fixed, and he plans to sell it to the highest bidder.
It stands about seven feet high, weighs in at 20,000 pounds, and cost the
government an estimated $19 million new in 1976. Cole said he bid a binary
amount, $10,101.01, for the Cray in sealed bids accepted by Lawrence
Livermore, figuring the binary number would be lucky. He won the bid, but
it took a week for Livermore Labs to requisition a forklift big enough to
move the supercomputer the 100 feet to the dock where Cole could load it.
The Cray 1 was billed as the first "designer" computer with its
cylindrical shape and custom genuine leather upholstery. It took four
years for Seymours Cray to build the first Cray 1 when he started Cray
Research in 1972.
When the first Crays were delivered, they were the world's fastest
supercomputers, but only three were known to be still operational in 1991,
while others have become museum pieces.
The Cray 1 is cooled be liquid nitrogen, and offers 29 14-inch removable
media disk drives systems weighing in at 600 pounds each. The main
computer housing holds 20 panels with 2,800 printed circuit boards with
gold connectors. As for processing speed, Digital Equipment Corporation's
new 64-bits Alpha chip, 21064, offers the same processing speed as the
Cray 1.
Cole says while he could get his money back be selling the Cray for scrap
metal, he is hoping to get more. "Selling a Cray just to get gold out of
it would be like selling a Model-T Ford for the scrap iron," Cole said.
He's hoping Ross Perot or Bill Gates might be interested in having the
Cray for their offices. An old Cray employee has even contacted him to
offer to get the Cray working again. "I'm waiting to see what happens,"
Cole added.
Own a Piece of History Dept:
A couple of years ago, Tony Cole of Hayward, California, became the first
and only citizen to own a Cray-1 supercomputer. He bought it at an
auction, over the protest of the government. Apparently, the thing is
supposed to be sold to the military or who knows what other authorized
organizations. Anyway, Tony has taken the printed circuit boards (cards)
out of it and selling them enclosed between two thick slabs of Lucite as
collectors items, conversation pieces, or whatever you want to call them.
These are probably the only cards from a Cray-1 ever to be sold this way,
and there are fewer than thousand available. Each one is different,
two-sided, and cool looking. Each original card seems to have been mounted
on 1 1/2 pound copper plate.
Cole is selling them for $xxx.xx each plus $10.00 shipping fee (they
weight a lot). Each is about 8 by 10 inches. Grab a piece of history for
your desk or wall while you can. Tony can be contacted at Memorybilia
Computers, P. O. Box 25554, San Mateo, Ca 94402; 415 525-1212, Pager 415
377-7701. This is one unique and outstanding gift idea for the Techie.
Seriously cool.
A piece of history
TONY COLE IS A COMPUTER freak supercomputers that is. Fascinated with the
supercomputers that Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was using to test
weapons during the height of the Cold War, Cole bought a 10-ton Cray-1
computer at auction three years ago for $10,101.01. The government
originally paid $23 million for the supercomputer. But advances in
technology made it obsolete. At the time, Cole told Alameda Newspaper
Group he'd melt down it's gold content, sell it and put the Cray's hulk in
the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder
and a history buff, told him to do the same thing. Cole quickly found out
that wouldn't work, thought, because his 10-ton baby was to heavy for the
museum's floors. THE OPEN SOLUTION: Cole founded Memorybilia Computers, a
Hayward company built around his Cray. He is breaking that discarded hunk
of machinery into parts, mounting it in acrylic and selling it as
historical art. Don't laugh. If you've ever visited a top Silicon Valley
firm, you know this stuff is everywhere. And Cole is sure tech-art's
popularity will continue that he's just bought three, later model
supercomputers from Cray itself for a lowly $5,000. The cost to own a
piece of technology history? About $200 to $250.
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Wed Feb 18 1998 - 11:43:01 GMT