Comment by DonHopkins
2 days ago
I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray supercomputer, in a computer room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through, of course (all Crays required observations windows to show them off).
Just before a tour group came by, he hid inside the Cray, and waited for them to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from the back of the Cray, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved expression on his face, looked up and saw the tour group, acted startled, then scurried away.
The Cray 1-ish machines I had access to at Shell and Chevron were most definitely tucked away in rooms with no visibility into them. In fact the Chevron machine room had pretty stern "no photography" placards, which I took seriously and is sadly why I don't have a photo of sitting on the loveseat of their machine.
Getting access took just short an act of God and I was a sysadmin in the central support group! They didn't want us puttering on the machines, so as far as I could tell it mostly sat idle.
> a photo of sitting on the loveseat of their machine.
Unsurprisingly, I would say, the Cray is literally the prime example in "A Gallery of Computers as Furniture".[†]
[†] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601097
I was part of a group from the University of Minnesota that traveled to Chippewa Falls to tour the Cray plant. I expected to see exactly what you describe, the computer behind a big observation window. But instead they took us to a machine that was undergoing final testing before delivery, I think it was serial #5. They were extremely proud of their cooling and invited us to put our hands on the panels in the opening of the C to see how cool it was. I still freak out over thinking about what would have happened if someone had tripped and fallen into all those wires on the inside.