Cray-1

One of the most successful supercomputers in history was called the Cray-1. It was released in 1976. About 100 of them were ever made.

If you had bought all of them new they would cost a total of about $3.3B adjusted for inflation. Altogether they would have a total weight of about 1.1 million pounds.

Combined, all of the Cray-1 supercomputers ever manufactured would have about 1/10 the processing power, 1/5 the memory, and 1/8 the storage capacity of the phone that I’m writing this on.

The price to performance ratio of my most powerful desktop computer at home represents a roughly 575,000,000x improvement vs the cheapest Cray-1.

Cray-1 Supercomputer