I received "The Supermen : The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer" as a birthday present from my friend Terry. The book discusses the engineers and managers from a company called Engineering Resource Associates, who went on to form Control Data, then Cray Research and several other firms designing and producing supercomputers. The most famous of all, Seymour Cray, came of note with his very successful CDC-6600 machine that was 50 times faster than its predecessor, the 1604. The key wasn't cutting edge semiconductor technology, but rather the methods used to physically arrange and cool the circuits, as well an a deliberate effort to keep the instruction set simple. The machine was developed by only 34 people working in a remote location far from management. Starting a new project in a new location was a pattern Cray would repeat again with Cray Research and Cray Computer. This approach worked well through the middle of his career, but later projects suffered from complexity exceeding the ability of one individual to control. The Supermen definitely concentrates on the personalities and interactions of the people involved. The technologies involved are mentioned, but more at the big picture level. I saw a Cray-1 at the National Air and Space Museum in 2005. If you ever watched the Robert Redford film "Sneakers" they sit on a computer modeled very much after the shape of a Cray. Both the Cray-1 and the Cray-XMP where very successful machines. Seymour started Cray Computer to build the Cray-3 but it never had a customer, mainly due to extended development times. The Cray-4 development went much better, but the company ran out of money before releasing it to production. More than anything I was struck at how suddenly all of the supercomputer companies died out: Supercomputer Systems (1992), Thinking Machines (1994), Kendall Square Research (1994), Cray Computer (1995). And two of these were even building systems from lots of small cheaper processors instead of a few exotic ones. Thus representatives from both schools of thought were destroyed. The supercomputer heyday occurred at a time when that fastest machines were built from discrete parts, rather than large-scale integration. This was the very time I was introduced to digital design. I remember spending my high school days imagining building CPU's from AMD Bit-Slice Processors. The Supermen is definitely worth the read if the name Cray means anything to you.