> 65 billion ops per second in parallel, somehow became a processor with a clock speed of 650 MHz.

That specific example is impossible. The CM-5 was 1990 technology.

For all you know, that civilian could have said 650 kHz.

> Without any multiply corroborated first-hand information, most people can't say for sure one way ro the other.

We have that. We have lots of primary sources from that era which have been declassified. You and I both linked to pages with some of that historical information. We have people talking about their experiences. You can even see FROSTBURG in a museum.

And yet you regard a single second- or third-hand, unverifiable claim by Dolan as having any meaningful weight?

Why?

> not a special compartmentalized project developed in secret.

Then you know nothing about Cray Research, and are seemingly coming up with ways to patch your conspiracy theory - because what you are suggesting is a conspiracy theory.

For your conspiracy theory to work, just where is this special compartmentalized project supposed to be located?

Seymour Cray put CRI's R&D site in his home town of Chippewa Falls. Wikipedia informs me the population of the town in 1970 was 12,351. You don't hide a second project in a town like that.

And Cray put it there so he wouldn't have to deal with business meetings. If Cray had another project, somewhere besides his home town, then he would either 1) be off-site often ... so why locate Cray's public R&D there at all?, or 2) have someone else better than Cray[1] working at the other site.

It makes no sense unless you think there's thousands of people engaged not just in a conspiracy of silence, but also who managed to prevent any hint of tech transfer between the projects.

> this is not the fun discussion of possible future tech breakthroughs

Then as a suggestion, don't bring up cockamamie [2] conspiracies about topics you know little about ("I'm not a supercomputer expert") in the hopes of getting that discussion.

There's a lot of literature about the history of supercomputing, the NSA, and related project. Read that literature to learn what sorts of multiple corroboration exist. Then you can seriously evaluate if alternative stories are a better fit to the evidence.

[1] The blurb for "The supermen : the story of Seymour Cray and the technical wizards behind the supercomputer" (book available from https://archive.org/details/supermenstoryofs0000murr ) says:

> "After a rare speech at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 1976, programmers in the audience had suddenly fallen silent when Cray offered to answer questions. He stood there for several minutes, waiting for their queries, but none came. When he left, the head of NCAR's computing division chided the programmers. 'Why didn't someone raise a hand?' After a tense moment, one programmer replied, 'How do you talk to God?'" -from The SUPERMEN The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer

Your conspiracy theory requires coming up with someone more clever than Cray as the tech lead, who never talk about it, and nothing ever became known about it.

Except for an odd slip by a civilian.

[2] This time I chose a word my father would use.