3 ms·

I was an intern at SGI in the summer of 1998, when we shipped the latest minor version of IRIX, 6.5. I worked on a test suite for IRIX's pthreads implementation

by kmavm 6mo ago

I was an intern at SGI in the summer of 1998, when we shipped the latest minor version of IRIX, 6.5. I worked on a test suite for IRIX's pthreads implementation, and got to ship a teeny, tiny bit of real code that fixed a real-time hold-off in pthread_mutex_t. (IRIX is a hard RTOS, you see.) As things happened, the dot-dot releases of that minor version would be the last releases of IRIX to roll off the software assembly lines before SGI put it in maintenance mode for these last darn-near-30-years. In 2000, I was the 20th-or-so full-time engineer at VMware, where I worked for 9 years. Then was at Facebook from 2009 to 2016, where I worked on the search backend (now replaced), HHVM (which still runs the Big Blue Application, a shrinking portion of the Meta Empire), and started FAIR in 2015 (which finally seems to have turned around the "open" sign with Yann's departure). In 2016 I started at Slack as Chief Architect, where I mostly did not write a ton of code. I worked on a job queue scheduler which I would not be surprised to find has been replaced. And after that I was mostly encouraging/advising people doing Real Work. All of which is to say, it is quite possible that the last code I've worked on professionally that is out there running on customer machines ... is that libpthread mutex bug fix from when I was barely old enough to drink.

aa-jv 6mo ago
I was a young systems programmer in this decade, which were some of the most virulent of my life, and I had a lot of projects on Irix, particularly in Mountain View, necessitating my weekly flight from Burbank to San Jose for 3 days on site, porting and hacking and generally having a great ol' Irix time .. and oh, how I loved my trips into the SGI parts of town, the Birds of a Feather meetings discussing Irix vs. Linux (and SunOS and *BSD, oh no!), the flight simulator facility on the SGI campus where I would regularly get trounced by Air cadets in a matter of seconds .. the beautiful buildings that looked like they belonged under my desk or atop the Indy I had at home .. the confident air of the SGI engineers at lunch in the Oracle campus, the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!) If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like? Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.
- Theodores 6mo ago
  Fahrenheit was the end, as soon as that was the way forward, nothing happened except engineers went off to work for Nvidia, which nobody at SGI seemed to have a problem with. You can't change a company that sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K, and the PC was just making the old business model impossible. Apart from anything else, there were some good tools on the PC, albeit MS Office and Adobe Photoshop. The situation was doomed when you didn't need SGI to do decent 3D. They never would have reinvented themselves for this age, sad to say.
  - aa-jv 6mo ago
    > sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K Well .. Apple ended up doing it. Why couldn't SGI? /s Oh, I know why SGI couldn't do it: elitism. They were high on their own hubris for the latter part of the 90's when they should have been humbled by 3DS Max and Animation:Master eating their lunch .. and used that humility to build products that made people Think Different™ .. they already had a market doing just that, thinking differently to everyone else (who were bleating "Unix is dying, its gonna die, let it die!" at a fever pitch), but that market thought quite a bit too highly of themselves, methinks .. (I know, I was there, and I was one of them.. apart from the "Unix is dying" bit, I never once thought that since the day I had a MIPS RISC/os-based Magnum pizzabox plopped on my desk and was told to do something productive with it..)
    - anthk 6mo ago
      Apple literally did that with MacOSX: Unix systems' geekdom from the A/V-media-writers' Mac UI background. You attracted both kinds of white collar jobs from college background. As it came with Xquartz, you could run old legacy software for GL at highers speeds... and hire a graphics expert inbetween to do fancy PDF's/images for the articles and the press releases. GNU/Linux with KDE3 could have been close but sadly it was too fragmented. If not, well... imagine a full libre QT from the beginning, GTK no existing (no reason for GTK+/Gnome as KDE would have been good enough), automagic Motif converting code into QT at blazing speeds, and QT themselves releasing high quality C bindings. It could have been unstoppable, even more than Apple. No ESD vs ArtsD, Pipewire merging Pulse/ESD and the like would happened long ago. Kparts would left DBUS and COM/OLE in the dust. KHTML/Webkit would have been even far more powerful. Fedora woudn´t be the reference distro, maybe Slackware with dependencies handled with Slapt-get and a nice GUI installer for newbies. A whole different world, where the smartphones would provice both an input interface... and a sliding keyboard.
bombcar 6mo ago
It's weird to consider that the only code I have written that is still running (except for my own machines) is likely minor patches to various open source projects 20 years ago (and some games, but that's something else).
budman1 6mo ago
Irix6.5 was excellent. Great real time performance, with a large SMP system (thinking Infinite Reality). Also, tech support was outstanding. What a great way to start your career.

by kmavm 6mo ago

aa-jv 6mo ago

I was a young systems programmer in this decade, which were some of the most virulent of my life, and I had a lot of projects on Irix, particularly in Mountain View, necessitating my weekly flight from Burbank to San Jose for 3 days on site, porting and hacking and generally having a great ol' Irix time .. and oh, how I loved my trips into the SGI parts of town, the Birds of a Feather meetings discussing Irix vs. Linux (and SunOS and *BSD, oh no!), the flight simulator facility on the SGI campus where I would regularly get trounced by Air cadets in a matter of seconds .. the beautiful buildings that looked like they belonged under my desk or atop the Indy I had at home .. the confident air of the SGI engineers at lunch in the Oracle campus, the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!) If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like? Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.

Theodores 6mo ago
Fahrenheit was the end, as soon as that was the way forward, nothing happened except engineers went off to work for Nvidia, which nobody at SGI seemed to have a problem with. You can't change a company that sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K, and the PC was just making the old business model impossible. Apart from anything else, there were some good tools on the PC, albeit MS Office and Adobe Photoshop. The situation was doomed when you didn't need SGI to do decent 3D. They never would have reinvented themselves for this age, sad to say.
- aa-jv 6mo ago
  > sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K Well .. Apple ended up doing it. Why couldn't SGI? /s Oh, I know why SGI couldn't do it: elitism. They were high on their own hubris for the latter part of the 90's when they should have been humbled by 3DS Max and Animation:Master eating their lunch .. and used that humility to build products that made people Think Different™ .. they already had a market doing just that, thinking differently to everyone else (who were bleating "Unix is dying, its gonna die, let it die!" at a fever pitch), but that market thought quite a bit too highly of themselves, methinks .. (I know, I was there, and I was one of them.. apart from the "Unix is dying" bit, I never once thought that since the day I had a MIPS RISC/os-based Magnum pizzabox plopped on my desk and was told to do something productive with it..)
  - anthk 6mo ago
    Apple literally did that with MacOSX: Unix systems' geekdom from the A/V-media-writers' Mac UI background. You attracted both kinds of white collar jobs from college background. As it came with Xquartz, you could run old legacy software for GL at highers speeds... and hire a graphics expert inbetween to do fancy PDF's/images for the articles and the press releases. GNU/Linux with KDE3 could have been close but sadly it was too fragmented. If not, well... imagine a full libre QT from the beginning, GTK no existing (no reason for GTK+/Gnome as KDE would have been good enough), automagic Motif converting code into QT at blazing speeds, and QT themselves releasing high quality C bindings. It could have been unstoppable, even more than Apple. No ESD vs ArtsD, Pipewire merging Pulse/ESD and the like would happened long ago. Kparts would left DBUS and COM/OLE in the dust. KHTML/Webkit would have been even far more powerful. Fedora woudn´t be the reference distro, maybe Slackware with dependencies handled with Slapt-get and a nice GUI installer for newbies. A whole different world, where the smartphones would provice both an input interface... and a sliding keyboard.

bombcar 6mo ago

It's weird to consider that the only code I have written that is still running (except for my own machines) is likely minor patches to various open source projects 20 years ago (and some games, but that's something else).

budman1 6mo ago

Irix6.5 was excellent. Great real time performance, with a large SMP system (thinking Infinite Reality). Also, tech support was outstanding. What a great way to start your career.