Engineers of a certain age will remember when Mentor Graphics made engineering workstations. Remember those? They were overpriced computers with big monitors that every self-respecting hardware or software designer had on his/her desk, as opposed to a Windows or Macintosh machine that marked you as a receptionist, or worse, a marketing dweeb.

Mentor was just one of many companies making engineering workstations, including Apollo, Daisy, Intergraph, and Sun Microsystems. Remember them? Unlike most of its competitors, however, Mentor Graphics survived. Flourished, even. Mentor is now a big embedded-development company with all kinds of spiffy technology to help hardware and software designers.