IRIX and Software

vishnu wrote: Looks like a pretty nice IDE, wonder why they abandoned it...

Because they never wanted it in the first place. If it ain't Mickey, they embrace ! mmmm, kiss-kiss ! extend ! ooh, look at all these cool (non-standard) extensions ! so neato-keano ! exterminate !! oh so sorry, golly gee that's deprecated !

Sound familiar ?

vishnu wrote: Looks like a pretty nice IDE, wonder why the abandoned it...

It's using the native Windows toolkit, so it's fast and responsive. Haven't tried out the debugger yet. Of course there's no intellisense and no on the fly compilation - two things that make developing programs nowadays much more convenient, but I like the visual designer. Will have to check if I can add my own sample control to the palette.

As for why they abandoned it - I think in the late 90s they didn't knew themselves what they wanted to do and for some reason they feared commoditization of their business - they wanted to sell full stack proprietary workstations for a small niche, when they should have provided CPUs + Graphics hardware and, optionally, software, and look how to enter the consumer market.

I know, right? SGI had all these great programmers, writing all these great programs, the compilers, the SMP kernel code, the IRIX interactive desktop, the DMediaPro stuff, opengl, this Java thing, but management never budged one iota off their dead asses to support them or find markets for it. Instead they decided to toss all their eggs into the supercomputer basket. Against IBM! And we all saw how that worked out for them...

GL1zdA wrote: [ I think in the late 90s they didn't knew themselves what they wanted to do ...

That's a misunderstanding of US business philosophy. They knew exactly what they wanted to do and they succeeded admirably.

Tricky Ricky, Braindead Bob, Bozo Ewald : they took a ship with a billion in cash and rode it round and round the great white bowl, going to parties and filling up their bank accounts until someone pulled the handle. Then they stepped off, while the stockholders, suppliers and people who did the work got flushed.

Ten long years and nobody said a word ....

vishnu wrote: Against IBM! And we all saw how that worked out for them...

at the time they offered mips systems ibm didn't play much of a role in the hpc sector and putting their money on that was logical because that's where the big bucks came from. gfx and entertainment was nice but not the main source of the annual revenue. military and scientific projects washed in the dollars and that for many years.
the reasons why they ended up the way they did were quite different but i think we talked about that more than enough here already