Vector architectures have long been the of choice for build-ing supercomputers. They first appeared in the early aeven-ties and had a long period of unquestioned dominance from the time the CRAY-1 was introduced in 1976 until the the appearance of “killer micros”, in 1991. They still have a foothold in the supercomputer marketplace, although their continued viability, in the face of micro-baaed parallel ays-tens, is being seriously questioned. We present a brief hia-tory of supercomputing and discuss the merits of vector architectures. Then we relate the advantages of vector archi-tectures with current trends in computer system and device technology. Although the viability of vector supercomputers is indeed questionable, largely because of coat issues, we ar-gue that vector architectures have a long future ahead of them-with new applications and commodity implementa-tions. Vector instruction sets have many fundamental ad-vantages and deserve serious consideration for implementation in next generation computer systems, where graphics and other multimedia applications will abound.