Seymour Cray Quotes
Parity is for farmers.
Murray, Charles J. The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer. John Wiley & Sons, 1997, p. 74.
Actually, Kerry was incorrect, but he had a point, There are about 110,000 employees of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and every state has their own department of Agriculture with employees. There are about 2 million farms in America. So there is a government agriculture employee for about every 15 farms—a ratio that no other occupation shares.
There were many new scientific agricultural techniques emerging but most farmers knew nothing about them. Garfield wanted the Federal Government to provide education, communications and technical assistance to farmers. However, that was a radical notion and many did not see that as a proper role of the Federal Government. The President gave the example of an early Federal role of establishing lighthouses to protect and assist mariners sailing along the American coasts. Most Americans had accepted helping the maritime industry. Why not assist agriculture? The subsequent Federal role in Agriculture was one of the major factors in making the American farmer the most productive in the world as new techniques would be communicated to farmers rapidly and implemented without much delay.
Inscribed in the South Lunette of the Library of Congress
Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."
