Supercomputers, fishing for information

[ethan at 757.org]

>
> Yup, all dumpstered by the company formerly known as Rackable
>
> What survives is in the hands of collectors. They worked hard to save what
> was still left at the end.
>
> SGI was just as brutal to Cray. Scorched earth to their archives a decade before.
>

Ugh. To be fair, I even know CEOs today of companies making tech products 
that don't really like to look at the past or live in it -- they see 
themselves as focused on the future.

Still a shame they couldn't of at least shelved documentation and source. 
At the time of it's disposal it probably didn't seem relevant, and perhaps 
it isn't so much outside of those of us with nostalgia for the systems we 
grew up around or ones we dreamed of messing with.

Also, when I was younger (I didn't really participate in any of this hands 
on) I used to hang out in some IRC channels and remember seeing source 
code tarballs get passed around to things like SunOS, Solaris and IRIX. I 
guess they were leaked from companies with partner source code license 
contracts or insecure systems. Mostly used either as trophies or people 
looking for more security vulnerabilities (independent unauthorized source 
code audit I guess you would call it.) Right as it would happen you would 
see a bunch of new CERT advisories from some random group and it was like, 
"Yep, they're digging through that source tarball floating around." Those 
source tarballs are likely to still be out there somewhere.