Re:Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy SGI
by Theodores on Friday August 12, 2016 @02:49PM
(#12277887)
I have a personal Iris, an Indy, an Indigo2 and one of those useless PCs they brought out. Didn't get as far as having an Onyx 'Infinite Reality' at home, however, all of those boxes definitely had coolness that nothing else had during that era. The Susan Kare icons and Indigo Magic desktop with 'cpu-eater' desktop wallpaper was totally awesome, completing the look. Even the fonts were totally ahead of everything else.
In my opinion the Google Pixel is the only contemporary machine that has design edge that is envy worthy. I don't have the 'ludicrous speed' edition (yet), I am slumming it with the 2013 version but still utterly delighted with my '4Gb ram' machine.
The original SGI boxes didn't run any software that mere mortals used - no Photoshop, MS Word or anything else consumer grade. The Google Pixel is a bit like that too, allegedly you cannot run anything but a web browser on one. Mine runs a linux dev stack very nicely so, for me, I am still using 'winterm' style terminal windows with 'vi' much like back in the day with SGI boxes.
With things that are cool they are either cool to those that understand these things or they are cool to a wider audience, e.g. non-technical folk. My Pixel does impress mere mortals with the screen, the sound, the keyboard, the trackpad and the 'chrome' lights on the lid. Nothing else presents such a rich audio-visual experience in the laptop form factor. In mini-tutorials and working meetings I find the Google Pixel helps with the task in hand whilst projecting cool, albeit at a fraction of the awesomeness of an SGI box back in the 90's.
In my opinion the Google Pixel is the only contemporary machine that has design edge that is envy worthy. I don't have the 'ludicrous speed' edition (yet), I am slumming it with the 2013 version but still utterly delighted with my '4Gb ram' machine.
The original SGI boxes didn't run any software that mere mortals used - no Photoshop, MS Word or anything else consumer grade. The Google Pixel is a bit like that too, allegedly you cannot run anything but a web browser on one. Mine runs a linux dev stack very nicely so, for me, I am still using 'winterm' style terminal windows with 'vi' much like back in the day with SGI boxes.
With things that are cool they are either cool to those that understand these things or they are cool to a wider audience, e.g. non-technical folk. My Pixel does impress mere mortals with the screen, the sound, the keyboard, the trackpad and the 'chrome' lights on the lid. Nothing else presents such a rich audio-visual experience in the laptop form factor. In mini-tutorials and working meetings I find the Google Pixel helps with the task in hand whilst projecting cool, albeit at a fraction of the awesomeness of an SGI box back in the 90's.