A (very) rare video (or even audio) presentation by Seymour Cray, which includes a bit of history in the first several minutes.
The thing to keep in mind about the “cult of personality” surrounding Cray is not just his insistence on a Dunbar Number tribe isolated from from middle management, and not just that the isolation be in the countryside, and not just that the isolation go to restriction of telephone conversations from “HQ”, but that a good deal of the system design was done in his head – often during long drives (at times having to keep his kids quiet to avoid distracting him).
This image of the way “communication” occurs inside a human head at the pre-verbal level – emerging ideas into formal representation only after they have had a chance to organically grow in a massively parallel process of intuitive conciliation prior to being butchered into “words” – helped form my ideas about the value of individualism and see how dangerous social environments, with their demands for verbal formulations --can be to creativity.
PS: When Cray Computer Corporation (the GaAs computer company) went out of business, I contacted their GaAs fab guy to find out the disposition of the GaAs line. M recollection was that the potential for GaAs to beat CMOS was there and not just in speed, but in manufacturing cost. But due to industrial path dependencies, and what Sarah Hooker has recently called “The Hardware Lottery” regarding AI hardware, it was crowded out of the capitalization feeding tough.