On March 5, 1976, something extraordinary arrived at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It weighed more than five tons , cost roughly $19 million , and looked like a piece of futuristic furniture designed by someone who understood both physics and aesthetics. It was the Cray-1, designed by legendary engineer Seymour Cray, and at the time it was the fastest computer on Earth. The machine could perform roughly 160–250 million floating-point operations per second. That number might