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.
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.
SGI creates a low power cpu for Apple to use in portable devices, eventually in desktops and laptops (no Arm).
And either:
SGI launches low budget PC with playstation 1 level 3d graphics as soon as they could compete with win3.1/95, running Irix.
Or:
A few years after that SGI launches what is essentially the Voodoo 2.
Any way you look at it the only possible future for SGI was low cost mass market devices. Just a matter of picking which one, they picked none.
Yes.. some interesting thoughts there, MIPS in my pocket: hell yeah.
The crazy thing is, SGI did have internal research projects to do such things .. they had engineers working on porting Netscape to the N64, which could very well have served as the basis for a more interesting consumer-end mass market device. Imagine if someone at SGI had put a cell modem in the mix somehow, yikes.
Well, its all a dream. Meanwhile I still have all my SGI gear, and I'm not afraid to admit I've been looking at 3DFX Voodoo cards on EBay a little more than I should have today ..
>Yes.. some interesting thoughts there, MIPS in my pocket: hell yeah.
The PSP, and twice, as it had an r3k interpreter/loader for PSX games.
Also, you can call me crazy, but I played Nethack under the PSP with the CFW mod setting the clock from 222MHZ to 50MHZ lasting the battery a few hours more...
The GCWZero was a MIPS console too, and pcsx-rearmed had optimisations for that too.
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.
> the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!)
I remember in my youth when I first discovered Linux, soon after discovering that it ran on all sorts of architectures and starting to wonder how many of the computing devices I owned I could get running Linux.
The N64 and a Mac LC III were the only two I never managed to make it happen on. The idea of IRIX on one somehow never even crossed my mind, even though in hindsight it seems so obvious.
I read there was a plan to bring some kind of network platform to the N64, but I was completely unaware there was a port of Netscape to it -- and googling doesn't show anything either!
Do you have any more info? Is that something you ever had a copy of?
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).
Now I am curious, how does the voodoo 1 compare with the native o2 gfx?
The o2 used a unified memory scheme so it's graphics were never as fast as it's big brother the octane's impact graphics but because of the unified memory it was a texture power house in comparison, close to a GB of texture memory in 1996 is mind blowing, in comparison the ocatane's impact graphics had 4 mb of texture memory and if you payed out the big bucks for a max impact with double the memory(which was the size of a large motherboard)... you still only got 4mb because the extra memory was basicly sli. and a graphics board that had the reputation of desoldering it's own memory off.
Klipsch was famous for making speakers using acoustic horns, which was somewhat esoteric. When they finally made a speaker which used a conventional woofer, they named it “the heresy”.
A 3dfx card running in an O2 surely deserves a similar moniker :)
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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.
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.
SGI creates a low power cpu for Apple to use in portable devices, eventually in desktops and laptops (no Arm).
And either: SGI launches low budget PC with playstation 1 level 3d graphics as soon as they could compete with win3.1/95, running Irix. Or: A few years after that SGI launches what is essentially the Voodoo 2.
Any way you look at it the only possible future for SGI was low cost mass market devices. Just a matter of picking which one, they picked none.
The crazy thing is, SGI did have internal research projects to do such things .. they had engineers working on porting Netscape to the N64, which could very well have served as the basis for a more interesting consumer-end mass market device. Imagine if someone at SGI had put a cell modem in the mix somehow, yikes.
Well, its all a dream. Meanwhile I still have all my SGI gear, and I'm not afraid to admit I've been looking at 3DFX Voodoo cards on EBay a little more than I should have today ..
>Yes.. some interesting thoughts there, MIPS in my pocket: hell yeah.
The PSP, and twice, as it had an r3k interpreter/loader for PSX games.
Also, you can call me crazy, but I played Nethack under the PSP with the CFW mod setting the clock from 222MHZ to 50MHZ lasting the battery a few hours more...
The GCWZero was a MIPS console too, and pcsx-rearmed had optimisations for that too.
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.
> the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!)
I remember in my youth when I first discovered Linux, soon after discovering that it ran on all sorts of architectures and starting to wonder how many of the computing devices I owned I could get running Linux.
The N64 and a Mac LC III were the only two I never managed to make it happen on. The idea of IRIX on one somehow never even crossed my mind, even though in hindsight it seems so obvious.
Do you have any more info? Is that something you ever had a copy of?
Also, tech support was outstanding.
What a great way to start your career.
The o2 used a unified memory scheme so it's graphics were never as fast as it's big brother the octane's impact graphics but because of the unified memory it was a texture power house in comparison, close to a GB of texture memory in 1996 is mind blowing, in comparison the ocatane's impact graphics had 4 mb of texture memory and if you payed out the big bucks for a max impact with double the memory(which was the size of a large motherboard)... you still only got 4mb because the extra memory was basicly sli. and a graphics board that had the reputation of desoldering it's own memory off.
A 3dfx card running in an O2 surely deserves a similar moniker :)