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/

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.