born Sept. 28, 1925, Chippewa Falls, Wis., U.S.
died Oct. 5, 1996, Colorado Springs, Colo.
U.S. electronics engineer.
He worked in the 1950s on the UNIVAC I, a landmark first-generation digital computer, and he led the design of the world's first transistor-based computer (the CDC 1604). In 1972 he founded Cray Research, Inc., and there built the fastest and most powerful supercomputers in the world, using his innovative multiprocessing design. The Cray-2 (1985) could perform 1.2 billion calculations per second, an incredible pace in its day.