4 ms·

I've been doing 3D and film/video at the time on SGIs. While true that CPUs gained in performance on other platforms, IRIX machines were 64-bit, had great 3D ac

I've been doing 3D and film/video at the time on SGIs. While true that CPUs gained in performance on other platforms, IRIX machines were 64-bit, had great 3D accelerators (OpenGL was SGI's in fact) and - most importantly - they had bus bandwidth which was very important for large amount of data image processing required. Also, proprietary I/O was available for video and film which was only starting to come out for PCs (FAST and TARGA cards were getting cheap). It's all funny considering there was a void in the market. SGI (and discreet for video and A|W and Softimage for 3D) was great, if you could afford it, for high end broadcast and film and PC was nearly usable for video, but not for film still. Mac was great for video editing, but not for 3D... etc. Amiga was great for everything for video (not film), but it was, at that point, dead for several years.

gcb0 11y ago
SGI got lazy. It had the market for video and audio in its pocket. mostly because of what you said: I/O bandwidth! even if the RISC cpu was garbage (despite what the uninformed article says), moving from PC to SGI was like adding a SSD to your machine! it was night and day when working with video. Then microsoft come around and used its obnoxius tactics to take hold of firms such as Autodesk and others. which all dropped unix support to focus on windows. that was the nineties, when CGI quit being a small niche market to be the holywood standard, i.e. a very profitable niche market. apple scrambled at the last minute and got some companies too. the most important at the time was shake or tremor (never remember what was the product and what was the company) and quickly reworked the products to only use quicktime video exclusively, which obviously killed it down the line. because quicktime was, is and always will be garbage. i think at that time they got what is now their video suit btw. but i'm not sure. anyway, SGI ended up with no excuse for people to pay the premium price, not even on video editing. So everyone moved to PCs or macs. most of the custom software started to be written for linux (e.g. renderman) which SGI tried to corner by moving its server line to linux. but after itel and nvidia crushed them in performance /watt and /price, they just died for good. tl;dr; there is nothing special about MIPS. i give that assembly for mips is much more comfortable than risc. but meh. you always have to code for the lower common denominator anyway.
- Keyframe 11y ago
  You're thinking Shake by NothingReal (they had a product called Tremor also, but it wasn't released, hah). Apple did what Apple does. They bought the company and stopped development for linux and windows and stagnated development for Mac also. This made a lot of people very angry. Mac had the advantage, at the time, to be the only host platform for AVID editing products. AVID was the only game in town back then if you were doing anything remotely serious. Apple made AVID angry by entering their own Final Cut into the arena. This also made Adobe angry because Final Cut main dev was Premiere originator (Premiere was still shite back then). This made a paradigm shift for Apple because it was known as 'the' Photoshop and Video (editing) platform. AVID prepared their suite for Windows and Adobe concentrated more on Windows as well. At the same time (more or less) Microsoft bought Softimage (the other big 3D name, along with A|W) and made them do a Softimage|3D for Windows NT (it was IRIX only) to showcase their new OS. Lightwave came to NT as well and Autodesk bought discreet (IRIX ediitng and compositing powerhouse) and joined it up with their own kinetix group (3d studio and 3dsmax) - and Autodesk is more or less Windows only shop. This nexus of bad things finally came together against Apple years after, when dev cycles were a few gears ahead, and suddenly Mac was no longer 'the' graphics platform. Windows was, and to an extent Linux (in larger shops/systems). In parallel, Microsoft shafted SGI as well when they teamed up to make a successor for OpenGL called Fahrenheit, but opted out and bought/made DirectStuff. Fun times. I see SGI machines and software with nostalgia now, but when I remember those outrageous prices it makes no sense for them to be alive with that kind of politics. For example, in Maya (their 'new' software, made by their subsidiary A|W) you had two additional modules (Artisan and OptiFX) which were in five figures each. These two modules are standard offerings in that software now that aren't even mentioned/used all that much. Everything was a daylight robbery with them. EVERYTHING. Nice machines, all well - but robbery. On the other hand you had Amigas which were capable machines with software and it ultimately failed as well for different reasons. One was a high end robbery, the other was - they didn't know what they wanted with it I guess. One thing I miss (and I don't at the same time) is that we had a heterogeneous mix of hardware platforms and OS' back then. Now it's only a heterogeneous mix of OS', and even that is questionable. ARM is on the horizon, but I doubt we will see that kind of a wonderful mess we had back then on the desktop side.
  - 11y ago
Zardoz84 11y ago
Amiga's was being used on Babylon 5 first seasons. Also, I have Amiga A1200 with animations for TV and a movie across the whole 90's. So not was too dead.

gcb0 11y ago

SGI got lazy. It had the market for video and audio in its pocket. mostly because of what you said: I/O bandwidth! even if the RISC cpu was garbage (despite what the uninformed article says), moving from PC to SGI was like adding a SSD to your machine! it was night and day when working with video. Then microsoft come around and used its obnoxius tactics to take hold of firms such as Autodesk and others. which all dropped unix support to focus on windows. that was the nineties, when CGI quit being a small niche market to be the holywood standard, i.e. a very profitable niche market. apple scrambled at the last minute and got some companies too. the most important at the time was shake or tremor (never remember what was the product and what was the company) and quickly reworked the products to only use quicktime video exclusively, which obviously killed it down the line. because quicktime was, is and always will be garbage. i think at that time they got what is now their video suit btw. but i'm not sure. anyway, SGI ended up with no excuse for people to pay the premium price, not even on video editing. So everyone moved to PCs or macs. most of the custom software started to be written for linux (e.g. renderman) which SGI tried to corner by moving its server line to linux. but after itel and nvidia crushed them in performance /watt and /price, they just died for good. tl;dr; there is nothing special about MIPS. i give that assembly for mips is much more comfortable than risc. but meh. you always have to code for the lower common denominator anyway.

Keyframe 11y ago
You're thinking Shake by NothingReal (they had a product called Tremor also, but it wasn't released, hah). Apple did what Apple does. They bought the company and stopped development for linux and windows and stagnated development for Mac also. This made a lot of people very angry. Mac had the advantage, at the time, to be the only host platform for AVID editing products. AVID was the only game in town back then if you were doing anything remotely serious. Apple made AVID angry by entering their own Final Cut into the arena. This also made Adobe angry because Final Cut main dev was Premiere originator (Premiere was still shite back then). This made a paradigm shift for Apple because it was known as 'the' Photoshop and Video (editing) platform. AVID prepared their suite for Windows and Adobe concentrated more on Windows as well. At the same time (more or less) Microsoft bought Softimage (the other big 3D name, along with A|W) and made them do a Softimage|3D for Windows NT (it was IRIX only) to showcase their new OS. Lightwave came to NT as well and Autodesk bought discreet (IRIX ediitng and compositing powerhouse) and joined it up with their own kinetix group (3d studio and 3dsmax) - and Autodesk is more or less Windows only shop. This nexus of bad things finally came together against Apple years after, when dev cycles were a few gears ahead, and suddenly Mac was no longer 'the' graphics platform. Windows was, and to an extent Linux (in larger shops/systems). In parallel, Microsoft shafted SGI as well when they teamed up to make a successor for OpenGL called Fahrenheit, but opted out and bought/made DirectStuff. Fun times. I see SGI machines and software with nostalgia now, but when I remember those outrageous prices it makes no sense for them to be alive with that kind of politics. For example, in Maya (their 'new' software, made by their subsidiary A|W) you had two additional modules (Artisan and OptiFX) which were in five figures each. These two modules are standard offerings in that software now that aren't even mentioned/used all that much. Everything was a daylight robbery with them. EVERYTHING. Nice machines, all well - but robbery. On the other hand you had Amigas which were capable machines with software and it ultimately failed as well for different reasons. One was a high end robbery, the other was - they didn't know what they wanted with it I guess. One thing I miss (and I don't at the same time) is that we had a heterogeneous mix of hardware platforms and OS' back then. Now it's only a heterogeneous mix of OS', and even that is questionable. ARM is on the horizon, but I doubt we will see that kind of a wonderful mess we had back then on the desktop side.
- 11y ago

Zardoz84 11y ago

Amiga's was being used on Babylon 5 first seasons. Also, I have Amiga A1200 with animations for TV and a movie across the whole 90's. So not was too dead.