Hacker News Reader

Comment by apowell | Hacker News Reader

This article is from 1997, but the comparison to Apple is amusing:

SGI's sexy image prompted a Wall Street analyst to label it the new Apple. Sadly for SGI, that may prove all too true. Now, like Apple Computer Inc., the Mountain View (Calif.) company is a stark anomaly in booming Silicon Valley.

View on HN

Yes, it is very interesting to look back at the ashes <-> roses transformations since 1997 (mostly roses -> ashes).

  --------

Ashes -> roses

* Apple

  --------

Roses -> Ashes

* SUN

* Java (debatable, but the article waxes poetic about Sun Microsystems "which stole SGI's panache and profits by turning its own interactive-TV efforts into the popular Net software Java" except Java never became very popular on the Net, more on the server side and embedded).

* Netscape

* HotWired and Virtual Vineyards (who?)

Well, Virtual Vineyards are : http://www.inc.com/magazine/19960615/1966.html

I don't think Java's status is really that debateable. It's a huge success, albeit not in the browser where it was originally targetted. Java changed the way IT departments look at software engineering, and to date its only significant competitor is a language designed expressly to compete against it by cloning its best features.

Hackers don't like it, and Sun never found a way to get much revenue from it. But Java as a product and a platform can only be described as an unqualified success.

I've never really understood why Java took off in the enterprise the way it did. Was it just the automatic garbage collection and no pointers was a killer feature over C++?

For a certain class of developers: yes, it is. The IT world needs to be able to build big projects with big teams of mediocre talent. They can't handle the pointer bugs of C++, not the runtime-only bugs of dynamic languages. Java was a breath of fresh air in this world.

I went and looked for the date after this sentence:

While rivals such as Sun Microsystems Inc. ride the Internet wave and even IBM enjoys a comeback, SGI has been mostly an onlooker at the tech party.

hah, their Mountain View campus is now the Googleplex

Reply on news.ycombinator.com