> They were also joined with several engineers in Beaverton, Oregon through these mergers.

They might mean from Floating Point Systems (FPS):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray#Cray_Research_Inc._and_Cr...

> In December 1991, Cray purchased some of the assets of Floating Point Systems, another minisuper vendor that had moved into the file server market with its SPARC-based Model 500 line.[15] These symmetric multiprocessing machines scaled up to 64 processors and ran a modified version of the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems. Cray set up Cray Research Superservers, Inc. (later the Cray Business Systems Division) to sell this system as the Cray S-MP, later replacing it with the Cray CS6400. In spite of these machines being some of the most powerful available when applied to appropriate workloads, Cray was never very successful in this market, possibly due to it being so foreign to its existing market niche.

Some other candidates for server and HPC expertise there (just outside of Portland proper):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Supercomputers

(I was very lucky to have mentors and teachers from those places and others in the Silicon Forest, and also got to use the S-MP.)

Not the 10000, but I admin'd a 4500 back in 1999 at Bristol-Myers Squibb at the ripe old age of 21. It was running Sun's mail server, which required constant care and feeding to even remotely reliably serve our 30,000+ users.

One time it just stopped responding, and my boss said "now, pay attention" and body-checked the machine as hard as he could.

It immediately started pinging again, and he refused to say anything else about it.

I used to love working with E10k/E15k boxes. I was a performance engineer for a telco software provider, and it was so much fun squeezing every single thing out of the big iron.

It’s a bit sad that nobody gives a shit about performance any more. They just provision more cloud hardware. I saved telcos millions upon millions in my early career. I’d jump straight into it again if a job came up, so much fun.

Throughout the late 90s, “Mail.com” provided white-label SMTP services for a lot of businesses, and was one of the early major “free email” providers. Each Free user had a storage limit of something like 10MB, which is plenty in an era before HTML email and attachments were commonplace. There were racks upon racks of SCSI disks from various vendors for the backend - but the front end was all standard Sendmail, running on Solaris servers.

Anyway, here’s the front end SMTP servers in 1999, then in-service at 25 Broadway, NYC. I am not sure exactly which model these were, but they were BIG Iron! https://kashpureff.org/album/1999/1999-08-07/M0000002.jpg

To this day, “Sun E10000 Starfire” is basically synonymous in my head with “top-of-the-line, bad-ass computer system.” What a damn cool name. It made a big impression on an impressionable youth, I guess!