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In Reply to: RE: Nerdvana posted by Awe-d-o-file on January 31, 2019 at 09:08:40
There's a Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. After my uncle and I visited there last October, I can endorse wearing good, sensible shoes with lots of arch support before you enter their galleries.Plan to spend at least three and probably four hours there if you want to include everything.
Follow Ups:
As part of an IEEE standards meeting. Very cool place. When I was young I tested emoted coupled logic power supplies for Cray Computers.
Gsquared
The Computer History Museum off the 101-fwy and Shoreline Blvd used to be the Mountain View headquarters for Silicon Graphics (SGI). That is, the REAL Silicon Graphics before they filed for bankruptcy twice and were eventually bought by Rackable Systems (mostly for their service contract revenue). Rackable kept the SGI name as it had better 'brand value' than their own name. SGI was subsequently bought by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise a couple years ago.
I was at Silicon Graphics from 1991 to 2000 then bailed out when Sun recruited me.
I had a classmate who worked at Sun. I was a shareholder, I remember the brokers looking at me like I had 4 heads back in the late 1990s when this young guy who wasn't even 20 asked to buy $2,000 worth of shares.
Eventually that didn't pan out, Uncle Larry got them in his deep pocket as cheap as anyone can imagine. That just goes to show you how crazy it was during the .com bust.
It got even crazier. SGI had a habit of buying companies and screwing up the acquisition, not to mention screwing up their own company. But, it was THE most fun place to work ever.1992: Sgi acquires MIPS for $400M. MIPS was a big deal semiconductor company and maker of RISC based CPUs back then. They were not only used in large multiprocessor servers and graphics supercomputers, but could be found in printers and various other small devices. Sgi later spun-off MIPS back into the open market. Some A.I. company bought MIPS last year.
1996: Sgi bought Cray for just under $600M. Back then Sgi was in the 'mid-range' supercomputer business and the huge Cray supercomputers were struggling. After screwing up the Cray acquisition Sgi spun-off Cray back into the open market. Not sure of the rest but Cray lives on today.
Supercomputing is a prestigious place to be but the margins are so small it's hardly worth it. Many supercomputing customers no longer buy large commercial supercomputers, they just cluster a bunch of cheap 1RU high rack and stack x86 Linux machines networked over low-latency Infiniband. Some clusters might consist of dozens of racks filled to the top with cheap 1RU high x86 servers. They're so cheap and the clusters are architected in such a way that they just allow individual servers to 'fail in place'. They're often over provisioned so they can have multiple failures and not impact their performance requirements. Service is a lot cheaper too when you just let stuff fail. Sort of like washing your hair and letting a few fall out. No big deal. ;-)
Edits: 02/01/19 02/01/19
I worked for private companies for about 22 years in total, one was dependent on truckers for warehouse delivery, another one on the public willing to create content for free for television, the last two were selling advertising space on television which people hate, they hate the advertisements, I was responsible for about 10 years of political advertisements and things being advertised as boring as upscale sandwiches.the amount of crazy I have seen in 22 years as being a low level worker who just observed what was going on from a large distance due to my blood was so much an immense clusterfuck you can't put any english words to explain how crazy it was, and still is but it is silenced now. better off that way nowadays. one person can see a stock go up and wonder what happened, nothing but a damn exchange of a suitcase full of dough in a parking lot for a damn good idea that may make the world a better place.
Edits: 02/01/19 02/01/19
Without going into great detail it is my opinion that the failure of SGI and SUN (and many other companies) is due fundamentally to arrogance and paralysis.SGI: The pioneer in high-end graphics and graphics workstations was slow to move (due to arrogance in this case) when high performance graphics for the lowly Windows NT PCs became available. There were a handful of high-end PC graphics card makers that emerged. Early nvidia got its start when execs and engineers left SGI to form nvidia. They saw the writing on the wall. No, they helped scribble the writing on the wall ;-)
SUN: Sun was booming pre-dotcom bust. Sun famously coined the term "the network is the computer" before anyone had a clue. It's more true today than ever. They invented NFS, JAVA, Solaris. Linux was still a garage "science project" back then and real companies don't rely on "science projects" to run their multi-billion dollar businesses. All Sun servers and workstations had a network interface built-in, not common back then. Phones were ringing off the hook non stop with companies wanting to buy large 'vertically scaled' Sun SMP SPARC servers for the booming internet and WWW. After the dotcom bust, companies wanted cheap and free. Sun wasn't prepared for the onslaught of Linux and cheap 'horizontally scaled' small x86 servers. Sales plummeted, then Larry's software company bought Sun in 2010. Paralysis killed Sun.
Edits: 02/01/19 02/01/19
The last guy with that ponytail did what he had to do.
I'm very upset that the Red Hat will be pwned but that's why I am throwing enormous weight behind GNU/HURD now. We are quiet about this , no profit to be made.
IBM was very smart to buy Red Hat but that had little to do with Linux itself. Red Hat has a suite of software for creating and deploying cloud infrastructure and services.
Most consumers think of 'cloud' as a disk drive in the sky. As you know, it's much more than that and much more than the 'managed data center' model of years gone by. Smart move IBM.
Wish I had Red Hat stock!
bought it at $4 with my in coincidence $4 an hour job mopping bathroom floors to pay for college.
Linux died that day, still on the lookout for a good HURD distro, I think the Arch people will come out on top, debian second. It is interesting to watch the space now, there is no other alternative we have to work all together.
IBM promises to keep Red Hat as an independent operation. Like Oracle was going to keep Java free. They're monetizing it now asking customers to pay up or no support and no updates. ;-) Funny how that works, but I don't have too much of a problem with it. Good software has value, and people are willing to pay for good software. I paid a good sum of money for my music player software.
Edits: 02/01/19
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