4 ms·

From what I saw as a humble member of technical staff, the place was packed with really smart technical people, some of the sharpest people I ever worked with.

by fernly 12y ago

From what I saw as a humble member of technical staff, the place was packed with really smart technical people, some of the sharpest people I ever worked with. One thing the management did well was to recruit and retain a very high proportion of really good people in technical staff and the first line of management. The result was some awesome (for its time) hardware and great software (IRIX). Top management was apparently locked-in to their original winning formula, to build high-end equipment and sell it to the "professional" market that needed its capacities. It was apparent to anyone technically aware that the narrow-margin PC hardware was rapidly eroding the performance difference that justified the higher-margin SGI gear. I seem to recall that an in-house project to build an SGI graphics card for the PCI bus was scuttled, with the result that several of the people who had worked on it left to form a PC graphics card company.

Roboprog 12y ago
Strangely, I worked at a place that did batch data processing on IRIX in the mid to late 90s. While we didn't even use the graphics capability of the machines, I did notice, at least in 95, that they were a hell of a lot faster than PCs (although the DEC Alpha that I used at a previous job sure gave them a run for the money). I don't know what the price difference was between the servers, but in 99 we got new servers from IBM. We learned from personal experience that the way to pronounce IBM flavored unix is "aches" (AIX). I missed IRIX after that change over, regardless of the hardware price-performance ratio. I also missed having a workstation that ran the same architecture as the prod server. Sharing a dev server sucks, as there's always some jerk who will fill up the disk.
rythie 12y ago
To found 3dfx? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive - which in turn went from number 1 player to bust in about 4 years.

by fernly 12y ago

Roboprog 12y ago

Strangely, I worked at a place that did batch data processing on IRIX in the mid to late 90s. While we didn't even use the graphics capability of the machines, I did notice, at least in 95, that they were a hell of a lot faster than PCs (although the DEC Alpha that I used at a previous job sure gave them a run for the money). I don't know what the price difference was between the servers, but in 99 we got new servers from IBM. We learned from personal experience that the way to pronounce IBM flavored unix is "aches" (AIX). I missed IRIX after that change over, regardless of the hardware price-performance ratio. I also missed having a workstation that ran the same architecture as the prod server. Sharing a dev server sucks, as there's always some jerk who will fill up the disk.

rythie 12y ago

To found 3dfx? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive - which in turn went from number 1 player to bust in about 4 years.