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I was an HP-UX kernel engineer from 2002 til 2005, a brief interlude writing IA64 CPU diagnostics, and then and a Linux kernel engineer from 2007 til 2010, all on Itanium systems. In that time frame, it wasn't clear that horizontal scale out architecture (aka "the cloud") was going to dominate, and that scale up systems were going the way of the mainframe. The thinking was that there would always be a healthy balance of scale out vs scale up, and btw, HP alone did $30B+ revenue yearly on scale up with very slow decline, just like the mainframe market, which is still $10B+, even today. To put that in today's terms, if you pitched a startup with a $30B TAM, VCs will definitely be returning your emails. So no, it wasn't embarrassing to talk about working on IPF any moreso than it would be to talk about POWER today. It's just another CPU architecture with some interesting properties but ultimately failed in the market place. Just like Transmeta or Lisp Machines. What should be embarrassing, but clearly is not, is to slag off entire industries not knowing shit about them. Edit: I think working on B-52 parts would be an amazingly fun job. |