SGI: Discussion

Here's an interesting blog post from John McCrea, former SGI marketing/business development guy from the go-go days.

http://therealmccrea.com/2014/11/13/mak ... sentation/

He has a few other interesting posts with some "insider history" under the "SGI" tag . Worth a look.

josehill wrote: Here's an interesting blog post from John McCrea, former SGI marketing/business development guy from the go-go days.

http://therealmccrea.com/2014/11/13/mak ... sentation/

He has a few other interesting posts with some "insider history" under the "SGI" tag. Worth a look.

Wow, cool!

"SGI had gotten rid of all PCs and Macs; the company ran its entire business only on SGI hardware."

I wonder how long that policy lasted...

Great stories, added to my favourites .. last thing I added to my favourites was BOFH..

Great find. Thanks for sharing the link. Will make for great leisure reading!

vishnu wrote: "SGI had gotten rid of all PCs and Macs; the company ran its entire business only on SGI hardware."

I wonder how long that policy lasted...

Quite a while, actually. Pretty much until the very late 90s, IIRC.

josehill wrote:

vishnu wrote: "SGI had gotten rid of all PCs and Macs; the company ran its entire business only on SGI hardware."

I wonder how long that policy lasted...

Quite a while, actually. Pretty much until the very late 90s, IIRC.

There is a Mac-like icon in one of the desktop snapshots on the McCrea blog. Here's the one I mean:



I've never actually seen that particular icon on any of my SGI systems. Is that a Mac on the network? Or just a generic icon for a remote system?

josehill wrote: Quite a while, actually. Pretty much until the very late 90s, IIRC.

I have my doubts ... there was quite a bit of bitching in the newsgroups about having to have two computers just to write a simple report, because Nedit was not exactly a word processor ...

Jose, do you know if John was ever a cheerleader for the Dallas cowboys ? Or maybe a Miss America contestant ? Do you know what's really appalling ? As stupid as he apparently is, the people running SGI were even dumber. Incredible. I wonder how they found their way home at night ?

The shareholders would have been better off replacing management with a box of rocks.

hamei wrote: I have my doubts ... there was quite a bit of bitching in the newsgroups about having to have two computers just to write a simple report, because Nedit was not exactly a word processor ...

That started in the late 90s. I spent a lot of time at SGI facilities in the mid/late 90s. You'd see Macs and PCs in some of the engineering/training labs where they were doing networking and interoperability stuff, you generally wouldn't see them in people's offices.

josehill wrote: ... you generally wouldn't see them in people's offices.

That's probably why they were bitching

Would it have been so fricking hard for a high-tech super-hacker multi-billion dollar company to put a little effort into Abiword ? Sheesh.

Did you notice that conicidentally Mr McCrea did debunk an SGI myth ? The push to "big iron" came in 1994 after they made all their money in workstations !!!

Which kind of smears horseshit all over the claims of "our code optimisation is intended for massively-parallel supercomputers, not those crummy little desktops .. we just do the desktops as a courtesy to our Big Name, Big Money, Famous Customers."

Clark was right about McMuffin : he was a doofus par excellence.

Working in IT on Wall Street, we were happily getting by with just a DEC or Sun workstation on our desk in the mid-90s. Largely because we had licenses for things like Applix Aster*x (office suite), IslandWrite, ZMail, Wingz spreadsheet, etc. (Later they made us use Lotus Notes, but the UNIX version was no more/less dreadful than the PC version IIRC.)

smj wrote: Working in IT on Wall Street, we were happily getting by with just a DEC or Sun workstation on our desk in the mid-90s. Largely because we had licenses for things like Applix Aster*x (office suite), IslandWrite, ZMail, Wingz spreadsheet, etc.

Ja, you can do pretty much whatever you want on Irix, too. The problem is not what you send, it's what you get. This g-d docx thing feels like a time warp back to 1995

You would think humans would be smarter than that by now, wouldn't you ? We standardized on base 10 and arabic letters, we standardized on paper sizes, we standardized on railroad gauges, we standardized on 24 hours per day and 12 months per year, we standardized on nuts and bolt sizes, we standardized on road widths, we standardized on plywood sizes and nail sizes and wire sizes and red yellow green for traffic lights but given the chance to set up a standard right from the beginning, it was 2,000 BC all over again. Without Raquel Welch or the dinosaurs

Unix on the desktop would have been viable if the Open Group/OSF had ever gotten off their dead asses and convinced Microsoft to port Office to X. The fact that Office ran on the Mac is the only thing that kept Apple alive until the Steve Jobs/NExT reboot.

Thanks for linking to my post. I've got a lot more planned.

Yay!

johnmccrea wrote: Thanks for linking to my post. I've got a lot more planned.

thanks for that stuff john and welcome here

Really great story (understatement) really well told (also understatement) but then how could it not be from a guy who's got a creative writing degree from MIT?

And if you haven't seen it, earlier this week I finally told the story of the big pitch to TJ and the exec team (for what would become WebFORCE): http://therealmccrea.com/2014/11/19/the-pitch-to-tj/

johnmccrea wrote: And if you haven't seen it, earlier this week I finally told the story of the big pitch to TJ and the exec team (for what would become WebFORCE): http://therealmccrea.com/2014/11/19/the-pitch-to-tj/

Thanks for sharing that story, John. I had a WebFORCE Indy on my desk and a few WebFORCE Challenges in the data center for quite a few years. It really was a great solution at the time.

Next in the series: http://therealmccrea.com/2015/01/05/to- ... -software/

...with a bonus link to a copy of the old Silicon Surf site. Cool.

josehill wrote: Next in the series: http://therealmccrea.com/2015/01/05/to- ... -software/

...with a bonus link to a copy of the old Silicon Surf site. Cool.

Holy wow how'd you find that? I thought it would be lost to eternity since reality.sgiweb.org went down...