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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346 points BirAdam | 1 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 2.181s | source
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davepeck ◴[05 Apr 24 17:15 UTC] No.39944831[source]▶
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/

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1. ryandrake ◴[05 Apr 24 18:16 UTC] No.39945383[source]▶
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.