Lobbying at Westminster is a fast-growing business, but compared with Washington, we’re babes in arms at the game, and the reason that there is no question of Uncle Sam coming to the rescue of Control Data Corp’s ETA Systems (CI No 1,158) is that if such a thing were to be mooted, an army of lobbyists from Chippewa Falls and Armonk would get to work putting over the message that Cray Research Inc is quite capable of rising to any occasion, and that a set of Vector Facilities on the government’s 3090s will do everything an ETA-10 can do and much more cheaply, the Japanese machines are paper tigers, and just look how much of our money Steve Chen and Supercomputer Systems are spending on ensuring that the US maintains its lead in the 1990s, and of course the guy from Cray was joking when he said that Chen’s project at Cray was cancelled because he wanted to design his machine from the ground up, starting with sand to make the silicon…
