The Los Alamos National Laboratory bought the first CRAY-1 supercomputer for $19 million. Seven feet tall, with a nine-foot diameter, the CRAY-1 weighed 30 tons (about the same as an empty SR-71 Blackbird). It used about $35,000 in electricity a month, which it got from its own electrical substation.

But it was fast. It was rated at 133 megaflops (millions of floating-point operations per second), far faster than anything else available (ENIAC was rated at .0005 megaflops).

The CRAY-1 was designed and built by Seymour Cray, whose Cray Research built the supercomputer industry from the ground up and supplied most of its early machines to the military and outfits such as the top-secret (and calculation-intensive) National Security Agency.