swag

L'autista
Administrator
Sep 23, 2003
84,799
ya i heard that its an impressive facility
It's the old SGI facilities. Which makes a nice parallel to Google's environment, right before SGI collapsed. It's weird, because one of my friend's coworkers is ex-SGI, and he still tries to get the nightmares out of his head of being in the same building when the stormtroopers came through during the final bunker holdout there. :scared:

So in the waiting lobby of the infamous Building 43, they offer free bottles of Naked juice to any visitors. I tell this to my wife, and she's like, "They have naked Jews?!?!" :lol2:
 

Martin

Senior Member
Dec 31, 2000
56,913
It's the old SGI facilities. Which makes a nice parallel to Google's environment, right before SGI collapsed. It's weird, because one of my friend's coworkers is ex-SGI, and he still tries to get the nightmares out of his head of being in the same building when the stormtroopers came through during the final bunker holdout there. :scared:

So in the waiting lobby of the infamous Building 43, they offer free bottles of Naked juice to any visitors. I tell this to my wife, and she's like, "They have naked Jews?!?!" :lol2:
What's interesting is that when you mishear something and you're trying to interpret (reconstruct, rather) it, you do that in reference to all the facts you possess. So apparently Naked Jews must have been the most likely hypothesis, whatever the others may have been. Which means on some level naked jews are quite plausible. :D
 

swag

L'autista
Administrator
Sep 23, 2003
84,799
ßüякε;1824640 said:
Greg, what happened with SGI and bunkers or whatever?

Stormtroopers?
I had a friend who worked at SGI's main campus, which is the site of the very heart of Google's HQ now. Silicon Graphics was a very cool place to work from what I could tell when I visited: they had stations, like Google, to make your own espresso, and there were always creative outlets placed around so some employees could take a mental breather by building something out of Legos or stuff like that.

What happened to SGI as a business was that they went from really pioneering visualization with computers and the Web ... to getting caught up with super-expensive, proprietary hardware that no one wanted to buy when arrays of Intel-based computers running 'nix flavors came around. Then everything imploded rapidly.

I'm taking liberties of the horrors there. But from what I know, it was a great company to work for that vanished almost overnight with the gnashing of teeth and the beheading of thousands of employees as they desperately tried staff cuts to keep the doors open.
 

swag

L'autista
Administrator
Sep 23, 2003
84,799
What's interesting is that when you mishear something and you're trying to interpret (reconstruct, rather) it, you do that in reference to all the facts you possess. So apparently Naked Jews must have been the most likely hypothesis, whatever the others may have been. Which means on some level naked jews are quite plausible. :D
Exactly. As if in a "They have a T-Rex, they have stationary swimming pools... why couldn't they have naked Jews at Google?" way. :D
 

Il Re

-- 10 --
Jan 13, 2005
4,031
I had a friend who worked at SGI's main campus, which is the site of the very heart of Google's HQ now. Silicon Graphics was a very cool place to work from what I could tell when I visited: they had stations, like Google, to make your own espresso, and there were always creative outlets placed around so some employees could take a mental breather by building something out of Legos or stuff like that.

What happened to SGI as a business was that they went from really pioneering visualization with computers and the Web ... to getting caught up with super-expensive, proprietary hardware that no one wanted to buy when arrays of Intel-based computers running 'nix flavors came around. Then everything imploded rapidly.

I'm taking liberties of the horrors there. But from what I know, it was a great company to work for that vanished almost overnight with the gnashing of teeth and the beheading of thousands of employees as they desperately tried staff cuts to keep the doors open.
I had a friend.......once
 

Martin

Senior Member
Dec 31, 2000
56,913
SGI has this haunting quality to it. Back at the high performance department I used to work a couple of years ago there was an SGI "consultant" working part time. They used to have a lot more of those guys, and buy often from SGI, but by the time I got there it was only a few machines left, and a lot of artifacts; t-shirts, posters, manuals.. traces of a once great civilization :D
 

swag

L'autista
Administrator
Sep 23, 2003
84,799
I had a friend.......once
:lol:

that sounds fleetingly creepy
In a "don't mind the lights and digging in my backyard after midnight" kind of way? :D

SGI has this haunting quality to it. Back at the high performance department I used to work a couple of years ago there was an SGI "consultant" working part time. They used to have a lot more of those guys, and buy often from SGI, but by the time I got there it was only a few machines left, and a lot of artifacts; t-shirts, posters, manuals.. traces of a once great civilization :D
Definitely. That company sank like the Titanic. And yet there was this great civilization-like quality to it -- like the Titanic in its heyday. Very strange.

It is even odder that Google built right on its remains, as it seems a bit fitting actually.
 

swag

L'autista
Administrator
Sep 23, 2003
84,799
I have an XL SGI t-shirt I took from the storage room back then, there was a whole pile of them, discarded in a corner. :D
They may be worth something, and not in an Enron-vest-on-eBay kind of way. (The friend I visited at Google has a nice story written up of his experiences with Enron when we worked together: he got an Enron vest and ultimately sold it on eBay.)

I have an old SGI T-shirt myself. Maybe they will be worth something.

Now I wasn't living near here (nor alive!) when it all went down, but the other day I was thinking about Google and how it has an air to it that was true of the legendary Fairchild Semiconductor (and the "Fairchildren") in its day...
 

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