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/

> 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.