@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.