
The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995) - cr4zy
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html
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damian2000
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.

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JL2010
Tangentially related: [http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-
machine...](http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/)

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

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cynwoody
Thanks for posting that.

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jordanb
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.

~~~
rdl
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.

~~~
iuguy
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.

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fafner
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.

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flomo
Unfortunately, no pictures:
[http://images.google.com/search?q=thinking+machines&hl=e...](http://images.google.com/search?q=thinking+machines&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X)

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

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fabrizioc1
Try "thinking machine" instead. They do look amazing.

