‘Jurassic Park’ computer company sold for $1.3 billion

Cray has been synonymous with supercomputing for nearly half a century. Now the legendary tech company is joining the business that pioneered Silicon Valley: HP Enterprise.

HPE announced it will buy Cray for $1.3 billion. Cray’s stock shot up nearly 23% Friday.

Cray briefly achieved pop-culture fame in the 1990s when author Michael Crichton wrote “Jurassic Park.” In the 1990 novel, four Cray X-MP supercomputers powered the theme park’s DNA sequencer that brought dinosaurs back to life. In the 1993 film, Jurassic Park’s DNA sequencing lab was powered by Cray computers in the background.

Although never quite a household name, Cray brought supercomputing into the modern era. Seymour Cray, known as “the father of supercomputing,” founded Cray Research in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, in 1972.

The first Cray computer, the Cray-1, was less than a thousandth the speed of an iPhone XS and had 8 MB of memory (0.2% of the iPhone’s memory). It cost just under $9 million ($33 million in today’s dollars,