They seemed to stay technologically ahead of their time in various ways. They did NUMA systems with great performance. Did them in desktops, too. Tried stripped

They seemed to stay technologically ahead of their time in various ways. They did NUMA systems with great performance. Did them in desktops, too. Tried stripped OS's for the compute nodes that redirected things like I/O to others. Eliminated most bottlenecks that were in graphics buses. Supported open standards for graphics. The Bill Gates and SGI demo of modifying live video. Dual mobos in the desktops. Threw in RAS, Trusted extensions to Irix, and other things competitors were doing. Let you run Quake, though. FPGA's as a compute node later on with NUMA latency and bandwith. Took forever for competition to do that. All that said, the cases for the desktops and Origin especially looked cool as hell. There was definitely a wow factor showing off SGI hardware even to laypeople. Then there was one seeing what it could do.