crayon

crayola books | = C = | creationism

crayon n.

1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a Unix background tend not to be described as crayons. 2. Formerly, anyone who worked for Cray Research; since the buyout by SGI, anyone they inherited from Cray. Nowadays, often applied to any SGI employee who either works at one of the former Cray Research facilities (i.e. Eagan Minnesota and Chippewa Falls Wisconsin) or works primarily in vector computing aspects of the business. Sometimes considered mildly offensive by those to whom it is applied, particularly those whose work has nothing to do with vector computing. 3. A computron (sense 2) that participates only in number-crunching. 4. A unit of computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a standard joke about this usage that derives from an old Crayola crayon promotional gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons you get a free sharpener.

crayola books | = C = | creationism