"Cray died on October 5, 1996, two weeks after his automobile was struck on the highway and rolled several times. Cray underwent emergency surgery and had been hospitalized since the accident two weeks earlier. Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Cray quickly came to be regarded as an expert on digital computer technology, especially following his design work on the Although in terms of hardware the 6600 was not on the leading edge, Cray invested considerable effort into the design of the machine in an attempt to enable it to run as fast as possible. Cray once explained that he worked on the underground passageways whenever he was baffled by a particularly stubborn design problem, and added, presumably in jest, that while digging, "elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem". This time Norris was not willing to take the risk, and another project within the company, the The split was fairly amicable, and when he started Cray Research in a new laboratory on the same Chippewa property a year later, Norris invested $250,000 in start-up money.At first there was some question as to what exactly the new company should do. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I’m digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem." Cray died on October 5, 1996 (aged 71) of head and neck injuries suffered on September 22, 1996 in a traffic collision. Cray addressed the problem of skew by ensuring that every signal path in his later computers was the same electrical length, so that values that were to be acted upon at a particular time were indeed all valid values. On his return to the United States he received a B.Sc. Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Another driver tried to pass Cray on Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs, Colorado but struck a third car that then struck Cray’s Jeep Cherokee, causing it to roll three times. He was one of the most original computer designers the world has ever seen, and a true maverick. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1949.