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I was at SGI during its heyday. Best time of my career. The highest density of insanely smart people I’ve ever worked with, I learned so much from them. One th

I was at SGI during its heyday. Best time of my career. The highest density of insanely smart people I’ve ever worked with, I learned so much from them. One thing overlooked from that era was that the customers were so cool - they were building virtual wind tunnels, flight simulators, protein visualizers, etc - not running payroll or inventory management. We used to say our customers used our products to make money, not count money. Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-)

jahnu 2y ago
Like personal computing up through the 90s to the .com boom everyone was trying to have fun and make cool stuff at the same time. Being able to get paid for it was an amazing bonus. Now it feels like getting paid comes first.
- TMWNN 2y ago
  > Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-) Even that turned out to be not as large a market as expected. PC Magazine and InfoWorld in the 1980s ran many, many reviews of packaged accounting software at various price/size tiers. 70% of them died against QuickBooks, a product that didn't even exist then. 15% got bought by SAP, Sage, Infor (for some reason, Europeans dominate the "legacy accounting rollup" space), or Microsoft. 15% survive by selling the same software for 40 years to small customers local to them, and/or very specialized verticals (pawnshops, watercraft rental).
  - mrandish 2y ago
    I think the expression the GP was referring to (which would have been common in 90s workstation vendors selling to engineering/scientific customers) wasn't so much about accounting software specifically as big finance and business systems in general. This would include the high-availability, data center big iron supporting things like transaction processing, inventory and business processes in general. The kind of stuff companies like SAP can sell at $5M a year to one customer with so many modules I'd have trouble even remembering how they all fit into the overall global operations of a F500 firm. IBM and others could make stupid amounts of money selling computers, storage, networking, services and consulting around this stuff (and they still do). None of that software was "packaged" in the way desktop and workstation-centric people like me think of it and unlikely to be reviewed as products by PC Mag or Infoworld. For example, I had a friend in the 2000s who worked at Intel in "operations" try to explain the project he was working on to me. It was a multi-year, multi-million dollar software module + integration + customization contract with SAP that was focused on tracking, managing, projecting and optimizing Intel's product SKUs, which apparently number in the tens of thousands across variants, versions and geos. I never really got a thorough understanding of what it actually did but it was expected to take five years to implement and hundreds of people across multiple divisions worked hours a day in it and it was 'mission critical'. I asked what would happen at the end of five years and he told me it would certainly run at least a year or two over and then they'd probably start a new contract to work on the next iteration of a system to replace it (because that was, apparently, pretty normal).
- okdood64 2y ago
  > Now it feels like getting paid comes first. Understandable given the cost of living in SV.
  - rconti 2y ago
    In the blog, he commented on his brother being distressed as they were barely managing a mortgage on 3 full-time incomes.
kjellsbells 2y ago
Is 30 years too late to say thankyou? I was an SGI customer in the UK. Genetics research and bioinformatics. I remember when we bought our Power Challenge XL, (size of a refrigerator), some guy with a PhD showed up to install it and spoke biology. I was impressed. SGI absolutely rocked it in those days.
supportengineer 2y ago
What happened to this world? How do we get back to it?

jahnu 2y ago

Like personal computing up through the 90s to the .com boom everyone was trying to have fun and make cool stuff at the same time. Being able to get paid for it was an amazing bonus. Now it feels like getting paid comes first.

TMWNN 2y ago
> Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-) Even that turned out to be not as large a market as expected. PC Magazine and InfoWorld in the 1980s ran many, many reviews of packaged accounting software at various price/size tiers. 70% of them died against QuickBooks, a product that didn't even exist then. 15% got bought by SAP, Sage, Infor (for some reason, Europeans dominate the "legacy accounting rollup" space), or Microsoft. 15% survive by selling the same software for 40 years to small customers local to them, and/or very specialized verticals (pawnshops, watercraft rental).
- mrandish 2y ago
  I think the expression the GP was referring to (which would have been common in 90s workstation vendors selling to engineering/scientific customers) wasn't so much about accounting software specifically as big finance and business systems in general. This would include the high-availability, data center big iron supporting things like transaction processing, inventory and business processes in general. The kind of stuff companies like SAP can sell at $5M a year to one customer with so many modules I'd have trouble even remembering how they all fit into the overall global operations of a F500 firm. IBM and others could make stupid amounts of money selling computers, storage, networking, services and consulting around this stuff (and they still do). None of that software was "packaged" in the way desktop and workstation-centric people like me think of it and unlikely to be reviewed as products by PC Mag or Infoworld. For example, I had a friend in the 2000s who worked at Intel in "operations" try to explain the project he was working on to me. It was a multi-year, multi-million dollar software module + integration + customization contract with SAP that was focused on tracking, managing, projecting and optimizing Intel's product SKUs, which apparently number in the tens of thousands across variants, versions and geos. I never really got a thorough understanding of what it actually did but it was expected to take five years to implement and hundreds of people across multiple divisions worked hours a day in it and it was 'mission critical'. I asked what would happen at the end of five years and he told me it would certainly run at least a year or two over and then they'd probably start a new contract to work on the next iteration of a system to replace it (because that was, apparently, pretty normal).
okdood64 2y ago
> Now it feels like getting paid comes first. Understandable given the cost of living in SV.
- rconti 2y ago
  In the blog, he commented on his brother being distressed as they were barely managing a mortgage on 3 full-time incomes.

kjellsbells 2y ago

Is 30 years too late to say thankyou? I was an SGI customer in the UK. Genetics research and bioinformatics. I remember when we bought our Power Challenge XL, (size of a refrigerator), some guy with a PhD showed up to install it and spoke biology. I was impressed. SGI absolutely rocked it in those days.

supportengineer 2y ago

What happened to this world? How do we get back to it?