3/24/2026 at 6:00:55 AM
I was an intern at SGI in the summer of 1998, when we shipped the latest minor version of IRIX, 6.5. I worked on a test suite for IRIX's pthreads implementation, and got to ship a teeny, tiny bit of real code that fixed a real-time hold-off in pthread_mutex_t. (IRIX is a hard RTOS, you see.) As things happened, the dot-dot releases of that minor version would be the last releases of IRIX to roll off the software assembly lines before SGI put it in maintenance mode for these last darn-near-30-years.In 2000, I was the 20th-or-so full-time engineer at VMware, where I worked for 9 years. Then was at Facebook from 2009 to 2016, where I worked on the search backend (now replaced), HHVM (which still runs the Big Blue Application, a shrinking portion of the Meta Empire), and started FAIR in 2015 (which finally seems to have turned around the "open" sign with Yann's departure).
In 2016 I started at Slack as Chief Architect, where I mostly did not write a ton of code. I worked on a job queue scheduler which I would not be surprised to find has been replaced. And after that I was mostly encouraging/advising people doing Real Work.
All of which is to say, it is quite possible that the last code I've worked on professionally that is out there running on customer machines ... is that libpthread mutex bug fix from when I was barely old enough to drink.
by kmavm
3/24/2026 at 9:30:57 AM
I was a young systems programmer in this decade, which were some of the most virulent of my life, and I had a lot of projects on Irix, particularly in Mountain View, necessitating my weekly flight from Burbank to San Jose for 3 days on site, porting and hacking and generally having a great ol' Irix time .. and oh, how I loved my trips into the SGI parts of town, the Birds of a Feather meetings discussing Irix vs. Linux (and SunOS and *BSD, oh no!), the flight simulator facility on the SGI campus where I would regularly get trounced by Air cadets in a matter of seconds .. the beautiful buildings that looked like they belonged under my desk or atop the Indy I had at home .. the confident air of the SGI engineers at lunch in the Oracle campus, the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!)If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like?
Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.
by aa-jv