Apple Computer purchased a Cray supercomputer in the mid-1980s. According to Legend, Steve Jobs was Cray’s first and only walk-in customer. He arrived unannounced (so the story goes) at Cray headquarters in Mendota Heights, Minnesota and asked to speak to someone about buying a Cray. They nearly threw him out. It’s only slightly less eccentric than someone walking into NASA’s Johnson Space Center and inquiring how to purchase a shuttle orbiter.
Later, Cray’s president John Rollwagen phoned Cray’s CEO Seymour Cray and told him that Apple had just purchased a Cray that would be used in designing the next Macintosh. Seymour thought for a bit, and replied that that seemed reasonable, since he was using a Macintosh to design the next Cray!
