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A comment on The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber. Parent comment

Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by m463 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @07:25PM (#26336937)
My heart hurts reading that.

I felt something similar walking through Weird Stuff Warehouse and seeing old SGI workstations that I used to covet sitting on shelves for a pittance. Even if you bought them, you probably didn't have a 13w3 monitor or software to get them up. and now weird stuff is gone itself.

It's that "it's gone and can't come back" feeling.

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Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by sitkack on Thursday March 04, 2021 @07:53AM (#26341709)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/tech-history/...

When we look backwards in time, we see lots of tributaries that dried up for various reasons. That SGI workstation is still in your head, it is really up to us to copy and extend those concepts forwards in time.

That software is still sitting on a box of junk in someones basement somewhere, it just has to be found.

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Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by HeyLaughingBoy on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:36PM (#26351307)
That software is sitting in an SGI in my basement :-)
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Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by m463 on Thursday March 04, 2021 @01:50PM (#26346471)
That's a sad one too. it's hard to quantify the loss of an ecosystem.
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Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by xtiansimon on Thursday March 04, 2021 @03:46PM (#26348045)
Old SGI workstations and the things people make with them....I loved the surplus you could buy in the Vally in the early 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPvIs0I-gmg

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