The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

I was there near the end. First, as a summer intern in 1998, and then in 1999 as a full time engineer on what is now Google's Mountain View campus. SGI had always been a dream company for me. I'd first learned about them in high school; now, right out of college, I'd somehow managed to land a dream job.

SGI's hardware was cutting-edge and exotic. IRIX was killer (sorry Solaris). Cray was a subdivision. My coworkers used emacs, too. They put an O2 on my desk!

The dream didn't last long. Major layoffs hit just a few months after I started full time. I wrote about the experience here: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/

What did you work on at SGI during your brief stint?

I worked at Google from 2013 to 2020. There were definitely employees (maybe a majority) who assumed that Google would always be the dominant force in technology. Those of us who were a bit older always understood that everything changes in Silicon Valley.

Those buildings represented that change to me. I can remember coming to concerts at the Shoreline in the 90s and looking at those Silicon Graphics buildings: they looked so cool, and they represented the cutting edge of technology (at the time). And yet...it all disappeared.

Same goes for the Sun campus which is where Meta/Facebook is now. Famously, the Facebook entrance sign is literally the same old Sun sign, just turned around! [0]

So I always cautioned co-workers: this too, shall pass. Even Google.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...

MineSet, their data mining and visualization package.

Meta still has the Silicon Graphics logos on a few glass conference room doors in building 16, I believe. At least they were there in 2012.

Great memento mori.

I graduated undergrad in 1998 and can confirm that SGI was the company to go to. I felt so jealous of those few guys who had SGI offers, where I had to settle for a more generic PC graphics company. History is what it is but the SGI really had that luster that only a handful of companies ever boasted.

I had to support an open source library for all major unixes and the Irix compiler was by far the best one. It took years for the rest to catch up. But it took ages to compile with optimizations on. Good times.

Presumably you mean the Sun logo: http://www.logobook.com/logo/sun-microsystems/

Which is one of the all-time greats IMHO. I'd keep it around too.

> SGI had always been a dream company

It was a dream company for pretty much every siggraph person at that time. I was in grad school, eagerly awaiting a very popular 3-semester course in computer graphics. It had been devised and taught by a young promising professor who had published some pioneering siggraph papers. I signed up for the course. On the first day of class, the head of the department walked in and said the professor had been recruited by his dream company SGI for an ungodly sum of money to work on some Jewish director’s movie about a dinosaur themepark. I thought ok, whatever, someone else will teach the course. The bastards scrapped the entire 3 series computer graphics module because there wasn’t anyone else who could teach that. So we had to pick from one of the usual dumb options - databases, OS, Networks, Compilers. Since then I’ve always held a grudge against sgi.

Jewish director? Hrmph

Spielberg had a bar mitzvah, what more do you want?

> SGI's hardware was cutting-edge and exotic.

This was their downfall, trying to scale out adoption with esoteric hardware.

I remember being quoted $18k ish for memory upgrade on a O2 or origin, same amount of memory I had just bought for $500 for an intel Linux box at home.

Sure, it wasn’t apples to apples, but I remember thinking very clearly that this wasn’t going to end well for SGI.

I do! Thanks!

That's funny because my reaction to the O2 was "oh, this is far too expensive for what it is". Was workin on N64 game, and the other teams were using the Indy devkits, while we had PCs with the SN systems dev kits. Writing was on the wall at that point.

"Jewish director" is an...interesting description

> to work on some Jewish director’s movie about a dinosaur themepark

I assume you mean Steven Spielberg and one of the Jurassic Park films?

If so, why can't you just say so? Why are you referring to Steven Spielberg, one of the most famous directors of all time, as "some Jewish director?" Do you think people won't recognize the name? I promise people know who Steven Spielberg is.

> If so, why can't you just say so?

Based on the comment, it sounds like that's the way the head of the department phrased it.

Presumably the department head didn't know the title as it hadn't been released yet.

Yeah, the O2 definitely was too expensive for what it was. And while it was the least cool and powerful of the lineup by far, as a recent college grad, it was still the coolest computer I had ever had on my desk. ;-)

If a may, can I fact check a story conveyed to me through a mutual acquaintance of ours? The story was that SGI was trying to sell off MineSet, and needed the team to stick around long enough to sell them off -- so a bonus was to be given after a short period of time (a month maybe?). The bonus was significant enough to get people to at least defer a job search ($10K?), but SGI didn't manage to find a buyer. The check was to hit bank accounts on a particular day; the team waited to hear word that the literal money was in the bank -- and then all quit simultaneously.

Is there at least some truthiness to it? Or has this just become Silicon Valley urban legend in my head?

I think the GP was telling their story in the context of that time. It's a technique to help the reader more fully understand the context. I'm almost sure there is a term for this literary technique.

I don't anyone is disputing that, but why did the department head see a need to point that out?

Beg to differ on IRIX. I always hated it as an ISV. Solaris was way better to work with.

That rings a bell although fuzzily: as the new kid from school, I was pretty disconnected from the politics of the moment. I do seem to remember that the MineSet team departed en masse, but IIRC that departure roughly coincided with broader layoffs in the org.

(With apologies for reviving 90s IRIX/Solaris snark in my earlier post. :-)

Ha -- no worries on the snark; Irix probably was a better system in ~1998, as ZFS, DTrace, Zones, SMF, FMA, etc. were all still in the future...