[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI

[Donald Becker]

On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, Ian Dillon wrote:

> Likewise Joe, watching the demise of SGI has been incredibly hard to fathom.
> This was a great company with tons of energy/potential and did right by
> their employees back in the day.  I think this is why so many of us feel for
> the company and its current employee base. 

Lest we look only through our rose-colored glasses (and I have my own fond 
memories), we shouldn't forget the bad.

I recall many dispirited SGI designers, having just wasted a year of their
lives designing a product that was killed just before tape-out, or not put
into production because of internal politics.  In the mid-1990s SGI was a
company that didn't realize that a team that could deliver working systems
was rare and precious.

A few people here will remember that disaster of SGI trying to run Cray.
The culture clash couldn't have been more extreme.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Penguin Computing / Scyld Software
www.penguincomputing.com		www.scyld.com
Annapolis MD and San Francisco CA