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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

(www.abortretry.fail)
346 points BirAdam | 1 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | 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. ska ◴[05 Apr 24 22:04 UTC] No.39947806[source]▶
> 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.