New Year's Cleaning

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

Ben,

>  SGI was the Unix world's answer to the Apple Macintosh: Physical
>design is colorful, bold, almost artistic; all the OEM pieces work
>together very well; oh-so-pretty desktop GUI; utterly incompatible
>with anything third-party; way more expensive than everything else.
>;-)

These machines started about the time that the team which designed the
first of DECs MIPS workstations left DECwest and went to SGI.  I believe
the engineering manager's name was Tom Furlong, and he was very bright
and a nice guy.

I remember going to Byte Magazine Labs in Peterborough and seeing one of
the SGI Indigos there.  It was playing music from a CD, running a nice
equalizer, doing some nice graphics etc. etc. and the people testing it
were gaga over the audio.

I watched it for a while and asked them what the machine could do while
it was playing the music and doing the graphics.

"Not much" was the answer.

I told them I could buy a much cheaper CD player, and what I really
wanted was a computer.

md