I was a heavy user of the Cray-1, Cray-XMP and Cray-2 at the magnetic fusion computing center at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. One of the important things to remember was that the Crays of this generation were vector processors, that is they carried out operations across multiple elements of arrays at once. If you didn't structure your code properly, you didn't see these extraordinarily high instruction rates.
And, yes, quite some time ago I noticed that my cell phone had surpassed the capabilities of these early Crays :)
And, yes, quite some time ago I noticed that my cell phone had surpassed the capabilities of these early Crays :)