Author: Hla Min (Lifelong Learner)

by Hla Min

Updated : Feb 2026

SGI

• Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) sold $10,000+ work stations.
• Its customers include the movie companies doing computer animation.
• With the advent of powerful graphic chips and PCs which offer graphics and animations at reasonable prices, SGI folded.

SGI Buildings

• Computer History Museum (CHM) bought one of the SGI buildings on Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View.
• Google bought most of the remaining SGI buildings and created its GooglePlex.

Caution

• A top company may be toppled by competitors and innovators.

Posts

• Competition
• Innovation
• Obsolescence
• Technology

When one is sending e-mail to specified recipients, one is pushing one’s message to others. The intended recipients may (a) welcome your message (b) defer to check your message (c) may ignore your message (d) flag your message as “junk” …

Some e-mail systems send acknowledgement for important messages. Some may ask you to verify for the first time. E-mail systems may maintain “Black lists” and “White lists”.

Some have multiple e-mails either with different email providers (e.g. Gmail and Yahoo mail) or even with a single email (e.g. one for private, another for business).

Some email systems provide encryption.

In one of my jobs, we could not specify sensitive information in e-mails.

Do not assume that your deleted e-mail is gone forever. There is logical deletion and physical deletion. Even with physical deletion, copies of the e-mail may still linger in one or more mail servers and backup devices.

Email providers will scan your e-mail (e.g. using AdSense or a Recommended System) to offer you targeted advertisements.

U Khin Maung Zaw (KMZ, EC76) wrote :

(1) One of the surprises we discovered while on an IBM mainframe system is that a small file which keep track of the email system had the heaviest activity. Part of this small checked the flags, like who in your distribution list had seen/viewed your message. We then acquired a SSD, Solid State Device, mainly for passing files and this email network file on SSD, and saw the high improvement in the overall performance.

Heard from the grapevine that, later email systems attempted as such but it did not scale well as the user population exploded.

(2) One of my directors at the time proudly let his subordinates know that he had no more than 20 messages in his inbox at any given time. Of course, he spent some time deleting them as they came in,

(3) In my last company, email system had come very close to abuse, thousand or more messages a day, and people spent hours a day just for going through daily mails, this is even with the files. There are many times that you could even go through messages from immediate manager.

Many of these messages originated from plethora of monitoring systems, hardware/infrastructural /applications, drove people nuts.

(4) When we first started in my last company, in late 90s, everyone (not in the executive levels) had the inbox size of 20MB. It became minuscule as soon as we had, notifications came every day to remove/archive the old messages. In the mid-2010s the inbox size was at 250MB, that’s in Office365.