- Chapter 1.Profile of the “Real Programmer”
- Chapter 2.Think Like a Computer
- Chapter 6.My NSA Mug Shot
- Chapter 7.It Was Nothing, They Said
- Chapter 8.Ducky Day
- Chapter 10.The Veil
- Chapter 11.Oil Across the Water
- Chapter 12.Desert Shield
Living Amongst the Wizards of Cray Research
What does it really mean to work among “wizards”?
At Cray Research, the machines were legendary, but the culture behind them mattered just as much. Living Amongst the Wizards of Cray Research offers an insider’s view of a place where problems resisted clean explanations, debugging was a way of life, and expertise emerged from sustained exposure to failure, uncertainty, and responsibility.
Rather than celebrating genius or heroics, the book focuses on method: how engineers learned to reason about complex systems, argue ideas into existence, use humor as pressure relief, and recognize patterns long before tools could make them obvious. The stories are grounded, sometimes uncomfortable, and often quietly funny.
This is not a nostalgia piece or a technical manual. It is a reflection on how rare expertise is formed, how demanding cultures endure, and what it actually feels like to live inside work that cannot be simplified.
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About
About the Book
You will be wondering about the rubber duck atop a CRAY-1 being hand assembled in Chippewa Falls. Our passive-aggressive employee dissent became the Ducky Day annual celebration. This book brings you the unusual company culture that kept us in first place when second place did not count. Wizardry came from engineering not magic. We viewed constraints as points of leverage, identifying capabilities before suggesting solutions.
This book is a first‑person historical account of working inside and alongside high‑end computing environments from the late twentieth century.
Through personal anecdotes and technical reminiscence, it documents how software, hardware, and organizations operated in practice, including legacy systems, supercomputing culture, and professional life inside institutions such as Cray Research and related organizations. The focus remains on what existed and how work was experienced at the time.
The material is presented as reflective nonfiction, combining workplace memoir with computing history, rather than as instruction or professional guidance.
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Author
About the Author
Edward W. Barnard
No Time to Be Beginners
What was it like to stand in the breach, with nobody else to take the decisions, and do-overs are too late? Margaret Hamilton, the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT, explained:
Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.
During the Cold War when it was "nobody but us," our decisions and solutions were shaped by constraints. At Cray Research constraints and barriers pointed us to the best point of leverage. To remain the best in the world, we had no other option. But before considering leverage, we carefully identified and proved relevant capabilities. Those capabilities showed us what solutions might be plausible. We also found that if it wasn't fun, it probably was not worth doing.
This forced way of working, where responsibility could not be abstracted away, has been mostly lost to time.
My Role as Custodian of Lost Skills
I am bringing you those skills because they were never passed to the next generation. I created a primary source document showing what it was like: Nobody but Us: A History of Cray Research's Software and the Building of the World's Fastest Supercomputer. But I wrote a second primary source, reproducing the Cray Research skills for you right now, in 2026. The Wizard's Lens: Learn to Think Like AI is an apprenticeship drawing you in to experience, not merely read about, how we continuously "achieved the impossible" at Cray Research.
Those Cray Research skills did not begin with software, or even hardware. They began outdoors. Experiential education, with real risks and real consequences, has also been abstracted away. That is where judgement is formed. For this I wrote Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education.
Pure Entertainment
If it isn't fun, it probably isn't worth doing. I continued practicing the most important debugging skill I know: spotting patterns and connections that others miss. I wrote Unexpected Histories to show you shifted perspectives, purely for entertainment, but showing real history that matters today. In each case, once you see it, you cannot "un-see" it.
Episode 317
An Interview with Edward W. Barnard
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