The first and second glances at Cray Research’s manufacturing plant (in the distinctly un‐Silicon Valley milieu of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin) do not trigger images of the high technology frontier. The long, low, aesthetically neutral building looks very much like the shoe factory it, until quite recently, was; inside platoons of women, working shoulder to shoulder in a rain forest of stringy material draped from the ceiling, evoke memories of the infamous sweat shops of the early years of the century. These knee‐jerk mental pictures are stunningly inappropriate. The products of this obsolete‐looking assembly line are Cray supercomputers, the biggest sellers in that increasingly mindwarping arena of computer science.