But still, there's something to the Cray.

And so, as GigaOm reports, two hobbyists, Chris Fenton and Andras Tantos, decided to try to recreate the machine, but at desktop scale.

The physical form was relatively easy to put together. They used a CNC machine, painted the wood model, and covered the "semicircle" with pleather. The hardware was easy to get a hold of, too.

"It wasn’t difficult to find a board option that could handle emulating the original Cray computational architecture. Fenton settled on the $225 Spartan 3E-1600, which is tiny enough to fit in a drawer built into the bench," GigaOm writes. "Considering the first Crays cost between $5 and 8 million, that’s a pretty impressive bargain."

Fenton and Tantos

The thing that turned out to be tricky, actually, was the software. No one had preserved a copy of the Cray operating system. Not the Computer History Museum. Not the U.S. government. It was just gone.

Fenton searched high and low, eventually finding an old disc pack that contained a later version of the Cray OS. Restoring the software to usable condition proved a ridiculously ornate task, which Tantos, a Microsoft engineer took over. And, after a year of work, they're finally getting somewhere:

[Tantos] rewrote the recovery tools, plus a simulator for the software and supporting equipment like printers, monitors, keyboards and more. For the greater part of the last year, he arduously reverse engineered the OS from the image. Despite a few remaining bugs, the Cray OS now works.

For them and for us, this should serve as a reminder that computing eats its own history. The Cray was the supercomputer, and not a single historian or archivist can show you the working object itself.

Luckily, the world has nerds like Chris Fenton and Andras Tantos. Thanks.