A rare photo of the last steam-sheep before electrification.

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Mark Newton

Like 16 February at 9:37 | Open on eigenmagic.net

36 comments

Rob Chapman :ohai: ✍🏼🐧

@NewtonMark 🤣

16 February at 10:03 | Open on ohai.social

allrite

@NewtonMark Ah, the good old days when your mutton came pre-roasted.

16 February at 10:06 | Open on masto.allrite.at

Mark Newton

@allrite Woolly jumper pre-warmed.

16 February at 10:06 | Open on eigenmagic.net

[HUGS] getimiskon :OwOid: :blobcatgooglywtf: :verified_neko:

@NewtonMark ah shit, a cow-sheep hybrid :blobcatgoogly:

16 February at 10:29 | Open on fedi.getimiskon.xyz

/usr/people/flexion

@NewtonMark animation idea for next FieldFX TIC-80 bytejam session @ToBach 🐑😆

16 February at 10:48 | Open on oldbytes.space

Mark Newton

@flexion @ToBach Being followed by @flexion is a bit nostalgic.

I used to work for a UNIX consulting company (back when such things existed) and worked closely with various folks at Silicon Graphics in Australia on user training materials for some software called Performance Copilot, which did what we’d now call telemetry and observability for performance analysis for IRIX 6.x, Origin hardware, and correctly instrumented applications.

Supercomputer applications. Performance is a big deal, and bottlenecks can be non-obvious. PCP was part of their high performance computing toolkit at the time.

I’ve forgotten virtually all of it now, it was way back in the mid/late 1990s.

But I still remember that Silicon Graphics was definitely the kind of company that followed the “hard shell with a soft chewy centre” philosophy: Once you were inside their firewall on their corporate network, you could access EVERYTHING.

As a geek it was intoxicating to be able to “telnet bonnie.engr” (which was physically in the Mountain View building now occupied by the Computer History Museum), log in to a passwordless guest account, “cd /usr/src”, and see all of the IRIX source code laid out in front of you. Kernel, SysVR4 shell tools, Indigo Magic desktop applications, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.

They used cscope, so the code was even indexed roughly like in a modern IDE.

Good memories anyway, and I’m glad @flexion is keeping it alive.

@flexion @ToBach Being followed by @flexion is a bit nostalgic.

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16 February at 11:00 | Open on eigenmagic.net

/usr/people/flexion

@NewtonMark Have to admit, I am a bit jealous :) Epic times! Thanks for sharing! 😎👌

16 February at 11:07 | Open on oldbytes.space

Mark Newton

@flexion They had so many incredibly smart people there. Really easy to be overawed by the experience of pretty much everyone around you.

The company made a massive strategic error by getting behind Windows on Intel workstations. Until then, they were arguably one of a small number of companies that the US Govt would never permit to go bankrupt, because as one of the small number of domestic supercomputer manufacturers the spooks would always need them for signals intelligence analysis, and DoE would always need them to run nuclear simulations after the START treaty meant they couldn’t do live detonations anymore.

Ownership of MIPS meant they had their own in-house CPU architecture and fab capability. It was basically them, Cray and IBM, but IBM sucked in the 1990s and SGI bought Cray, so for a while there they were the only game in town.

But once they lost focus on that, they became basically just another generic PC company selling hardware to run rendering software for Hollywood, and they died on the vine as high performance computing shifted to large arrays of Linux boxes.

Origin architecture was cool though. Everyone with an Onyx secretly wanted a 9-rack Origin 2000 upgrade :)

@flexion They had so many incredibly smart people there. Really easy to be overawed by the experience of pretty much everyone around you.

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16 February at 11:21 | Open on eigenmagic.net