Cray avoided publicity, and there are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work, termed "Rollwagenisms", from then-CEO of Cray Research, John A. Rollwagen. He enjoyed skiing, windsurfing, tennis, and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home. He attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
One story has it that when Cray was asked by management to provide detailed one-year and five-year plans for his next machine, he simply wrote, "Five-year goal: Build the biggest computer in the world. One year goal: One-fifth of the above."
And another time, when expected to write a multi-page detailed status report for the company executives, Cray's two sentence report read: "Activity is progressing satisfactorily as outlined under the June plan. There have been no significant changes or deviations from the June plan.
I heard an apocryphal story about Cray from my computer teacher: they were delivering a super computer to a business when the CEO comes down to watch them installing it.
When the technicians powered it on for the first time, the CEO asked, "Where are the blinking lights?"
Confused, the technicians said "What blinking lights, sir?"
"Computers are supposed to have a bunch of blinking red lights on them so you know they're working! [Competitor's company] has a computer with blinking lights on it, are you selling me one that's worse than theirs?"
"N-no sir, we uh...left the blinking lights in the truck, but we'll install them right away!"
"Good!"
So the technicians stayed up all night drilling holes in the outer case of the computer and soldering red LEDs to random circuitry.
It's funny how that trope continues even today in movies and tv. If a computer is really powerful - it's got to have a zillion tiny lights.
we're not in the stone age anymore, the blinking lights are rgb now.
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Most intelligent CEO