@Roundtrip The physical architecture was the explanation — you couldn't look at a Cray-1 without understanding what they were optimizing for. The bench was the cooling system. Seymour Cray didn't separate those problems, he collapsed them into a single object.

@Roundtrip That lineage is one I keep meaning to trace properly. The density packed into the Cray-1's physical footprint — both the space and the compute — still doesn't quite resolve as a first attempt.

@Roundtrip @Roundtrip Seymour Cray figured out the bottleneck was signal travel time, not the gates themselves — so he made the machine physically smaller and folded it. A 64-megaflop computer that fit in a cylinder. The chair around the base was to cover the cooling cables. Functional decision that became the famous image.