[flash forward]

Word of the team's success buzzed through the computer industry with extraordinary speed.  Within days the Business Week article found its way to the highest office in IBM, prompting a scathing memo from company president Thomas Watson:

Last week Control Data had a press conference during which they officially announced their 6600 system.  I understand that in the laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people, including the janitor.  Of these 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers, and only one person has a Ph.D., a relatively junior programmer.  Constrasting this modest effort with our own vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world's most powerful computer.

[flash back]

As soon as they arrived at the new facility, the crew began to realize just how detached they were.  After ambling through the building's tiny lobby and sitting down in their labs every morning, they suddenly realized that they had no interruptions.  It was a strange sensation, somewhat like sitting next to a piece of humming machinery for days on end, then having someone turn it off.  The newfound peace was striking.

The advantages were even greater for Cray. He had a beautiful Praire-style home built on the sixty-five-acre site, only a couple hundred yards from the new facility.  Cray design the home himself, and it was an extraordinary piece of construction -- no one in Chippewa had ever seen anything quite like it.  From the outset Cray had considered what he would need in the event of a nuclear blast, and had designed the lower level of the home as a fallout shelter.  Joists in the spacious first floor were made from cold rolled steel, then topped with four-inch-thick concrete slab.  Block walls in the basement were also filled with concrete; doors between lower level rooms were fireproof.  A six-foot-deep pool in the basement doubled as a potential source of potable water and ten-thousand-gallon underground tank held enough oil to last through four winters.  Construction workers were in awe of the building, saying that the basement contained more steel reinforcing than the new bank that was being built downtown.  Cray also added his own inventive touch, designing an air-conditioning system that would spray water on the roof and cool the house through an evaporative process.

The best part for Cray, however, was the new home's proximity to the Chippewa lab.  With the lab only about eight hundred feet away, he could work any hours he wanted.  He simply shuttled back and forth by walking through the forest that separated the two buildings.

After Cray and the other engineers moved into the new facility, management intervention ground to a halt.  Most of the corporate directors felt that it was too far to drive.  Long-distance calling was considered more trouble than it was worth in 1962 because it required operator assistance...

To maintain privacy Cray set up strict rules regarding visitors:  no sales calls, no management meetings, no visits of any kind without his permission.  In the Wisconsin woods, the engineers had a pure, blissful, bare-bones isolation.  No one -- not even Bill Norris -- could walk in without an appointment...

Despite the isolation, word of their impending success began to trickle out of Chippewa Falls.  Something unusual was happening up there in the north woods of Wisconsin, and the rest of the industry wanted to know what it was.  At the time -- mid-1963 -- the computer industry was so small that it was nearly impossible to keep secrets.  Cray's self-imposed isolation slowed the normal buzz of information, but word still traveled quickly.  Programmers at the Livermore lab were already anxious to buy the Chippewa crew's first machine.  Word quickly spread to Los Alamos and to the National Security Agency in Washington.  Everyone in the community, it seemed, had a problem that needed the speed of a CDC 6600.

In August 1963 Control Data opened the lab to selected members of the press, including the Wall Street Journal and Business Week magazine.  At the unveiling, Cray sat in front of the machine's television like console, describing its processor, memories and cooling system.  He quietly explained the marketing strategies and the logic behind the move to Chippewa Falls.  The press was stunned, not by the computer itself, but by the apparent incongruity of this high-tech machine emerging from such a low-tech setting.  A Business Week article prominently mentioned the fact that there was "salt lick for the deer" outside the Chippewa Falls lab, then it followed by saying that the 6600 "is several times as fast and powerful as any other computing machine in existence.  In fact, nothing quite like it has ever appeared on the market before."  But the article saved its highest praise for the small-team effort, saying that "Cray's staff numbers 34, including the night janitor."

Source: The Supermen by Charles J. Murray