
Hewlett Packard Offers $275M for Silicon Graphics International - dohqu8Zi
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hewlett-packard-offers-275-million-for-silicon-graphics-international-2016-08-11
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nickpsecurity
I was confused... thinking Rackable bought SGI... until Wikipedia article
showed me that Rackable took on the SGI name in process. Now HP wants to buy
them. NOOOOO!!!!!

That's my first reaction. I doubt they'll turn down the money but HP has a
habit of destroying things with good potential. They had a good RISC CPU that
they and Intel turned into the Itanic. They acquired OpenVMS but threw it away
instead of spinning it off. They're now about to acquire the source of some of
the greatest workstations and NUMA machines ever made. And probably trash it
somehow.

I don't know. Maybe I'm paranoid. SGI was just one of my favorites and their
NUMA tech is still awesome. Hate to see it get death-by-acquisition.

~~~
spitfire
Don't forget HP also bought Tandem. Who were doing big distributed systems
(including a distributed SQL database) in the 1980's. Thankfully, HP keeps
their technical documents database online[1]. Including the classic five
minute rule paper.[2]

I still have fond memories of SGI systems. I've had Iris PRO's, Indy's and
O2's over time. Their NUMA systems Origin/Onyx were amazing. and they had C++
compilers with usable error messages!

1\.
[http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/)
2\.
[http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Tandem was one of the exceptions. They at least keep updating NonStop. It's
still the best in fault-tolerant systems that I'm aware of. Need to do a new
survey in that stuff sometime to see if academics or startups have exceeded it
yet.

Thanks for links. Didn't have them.

EDIT: Thanks twice given one of those links may have answered a question
kragen had in another thread about why no heap allowed in passive, process
pairs. I'm thinking they're stateless whereas the active ones are stateful.
Heaps need stateful.

