The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995) | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995)

inc.com

98 pointscr4zy10 comments

This could be any number of dot bombs from the late 90s, however its still incredible...

- Insisted that each office be painted a different and specific color.

- Huge open spaces were created to stimulate idea sharing and creativity.

- A plush cafeteria was put in, complete with a gourmet chef.

- Couches were scattered throughout the offices so that researchers could take naps or even sleep there overnight, which many of them did.

- The soft-drink machine was wired to a terminal. Researchers who wanted a drink simply typed in their choice.

- Commuting in an antique fire engine.

- Handler had every surface on the new floor repainted a slightly different shade of mauve. When it was done, she wasn't satisfied. So she had her researchers and scientists paint it again.

- An enormous marble archway installed in the atrium

- She commissioned a $40,000 logo design for a CM-5 sweatshirt and then rejected it.

- While the company was sinking, she focused her attention on putting out a cookbook with recipes from the company's now-infamous cafeteria.

An account of Richard Feynman's time at the company.

Thanks for posting that.

The ostentatious stuff was par for the course for the 90s. Thinking Machines, like SGI, had a profitable market but was horribly run and found it impossible to transition from a research project to a company. OTOH, Sun Microsystems executed brilliantly but was killed a decade later by the commoditization of HPC.

Not just HPC -- they made more money on enterprise servers than on their few sunfire systems and Cray SPARC systems.

x86 and NT (and later Linux, but initially NT) killed them on the Workstation market, and Linux/x86 killed them on the server. Then Oracle engaged in serious abuse of a dead body, which gives us Java today.

Actually SGI were more or less destroyed by Linux too. I remember being in a meeting with them at the height of the dot com boom where we were told that they were embracing Linux for mid-range to replace lower-end IRIX systems. My colleagues and I came out of the meeting unable to understand why people would opt for x86 SGI hardware running Linux to run web servers at two to three times the cost of equivalent off the shelf x86 hardware running Linux to run web servers.

Sun could've learned a lot from SGI's demise but didn't, due to poor leadership (IMHO). I still remember Sun charging 5 times multiples of COTS x86 hardware for general web servers, and telling them that they were competing with x86 on price.

To be fair, Sun hardware was (again IMHO) very reliable and I did love it to bits.

Well Sun did learn from it. They started adopting x86 and Linux initially. But then they realised they'd only make themselves obsolete by this and stopped this. They released OpenSolaris to push Solaris against Linux.

SGI had a lot of problems. I mean they even started selling Windows NT workstations at one point.

A lot of SGI's problems were self inflicted. They basically sucked for anything except awesome graphics cards on the mid to high end (I used to have a $200k Onyx in the group I undergrad-research-assistanted at media lab). The Indy and such were wretched.

IRIX was actually worse than HP-UX; on par with AIX.

Unfortunately, no pictures: http://images.google.com/search?q=thinking+machines&hl=e...

(I have nothing to add other than they looked amazing, in that 1980s way.)

Try "thinking machine" instead. They do look amazing.

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