6 ms·
That and Intel hardware became better than what the workstation vendors had. Around 1999 SGI Octanes were about 50K, at the time NT machines (think Intergraph)
by sien 6y ago
That and Intel hardware became better than what the workstation vendors had.
Around 1999 SGI Octanes were about 50K, at the time NT machines (think Intergraph) appeared that were, for many, many purposes, just as capable. They were 10K.
In addition the MIPS chip was considerably worse than a dual proc x86 machine of the same vintage. I was working at a company where there was a C++ API. Compilation time on the SGI was 2 hours. It was 10 minutes on the Intergraph.
When cards like the Nvidia Quadro and FireGL cards came they were better than SGI machines and cost a few thousand dollars.
This guy worked for NEXT, who were eaten early because they produced massively overpriced workstations that there was a small market for. They didn't even survive the workstation market, let alone the coming wave of better hardware from very large development budgets for mass market parts.
- jacquesm 6y ago> That and Intel hardware became better than what the workstation vendors had. Exactly. As much as I liked the environment the premium you paid for what was sub-par performance really killed the market. And when SGI ended up selling intel Windows boxes the writing was on the wall for them as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation I disagree that next got 'eaten early' though, effectively every Mac you've used since those days was a Next workstation marketed under a different brand. Next morphed into Apple much more than that Apple acquired Next.
- simonh 6y agoWithout the Apple deal NeXT were toast, just like all the other workstation companies. They just didn't have the resources needed to elevate NS to the level of polish of OSX, or the market power to engage that may developers on their own.
- jacquesm 6y agoConversely, without the NeXT deal Apple would have likely been toast. That worked out for the best for everybody involved.
- eatmyshorts 6y agoI am not so sure. At the time I thought BeOS was a better purchase. I wonder what could have been if Apple had gone with Gasse instead of Jobs.
- jacquesm 6y agoAt a guess it wouldn't be the most valuable company in the world today.
- itomato 6y agoSteve knew how powerful and essential networking was to the compute paradigm we accept. Be’s TCP stack was never very good. It never had big money applications like Frame or Illustrator, and lacked the robust dev platform (and paying customers) that Next had.
- Jtsummers 6y agoBeOS was also a single-user OS, which made it a nonstarter for businesses. It wouldn't fit within corporate IT as it existed at the time. NeXT, however, and Mac OS X based in large part on it were both multi-user OSes which could actually be used by businesses more reasonably. And I'm using "business" in a generic sense. This was an important quality for schools, as well, where Macs were incredibly popular (for a number of reasons, including favorable pricing from Apple and historical support for schools since the 80s). Single user OSes just don't fit within any organization trying to at least pretend to have decent IT.
- frank2 6y agoI am mystified by your comment. How has OS X's "multi-userness" helped organizations? Do you literally mean two or more people using the same Mac? Has it been useful for organizations that users can ssh into Macs? Or is Apple Remote Desktop involved? (Does Apple Remote Desktop even allow 2 people two use two instance of OS X's GUI at the same time?) Or by "multi-user" do you refer to the services that can be enabled using the "Sharing" pane of System Preferences (e.g., file sharing, printer sharing, remote management, internet sharing)?
- athms 6y agoThey could have continued to develop and sell WebObjects, a Java based application server and framework. It was amazing for what it did at the time and many major companies were using it. They were leaders in that market. Unfortunately, it died on the vine at Apple. Also, according to Avie Tevanian, Steve Jobs lost interest in NeXT when it shed its hardware business and shifted to a software company primarily selling to the enterprise business community instead of education, its intended market. Jobs focused his attention on Pixar, leaving management to the VPs of sales, engineering, and finance.
- gorgoiler 6y agoFor a practical example of this, see http://next.com http://next.com
- reason-mr 6y agoThat thing was very clearly a hybrid - SGI's graphics stuff glommed force-ably onto NT. I remember trying to get PC code to work on it and basic stuff definitely didn't work. Probably it worked better the other way around (SGI app -> visual workstation NT). I never tried that though.
- rhrusps9vnfnds 6y agoLooking back, it's not like there was anything uniquely fast about x86. They just had more money, so they won.
- mobilio 6y agoIt's little bit funny because once upon a time MIPS CPUs powered workstations. Today they're mainly used for low-end cheap routers, because high-end market is occupied from ARMs.
- tinus_hn 6y agoNeXT was bought by Apple who took its software, which still lives on as the basis for Objective-C in the NS... (Nextstep) classes.
- bluedino 6y agoIt's actually Next-Sun....the original classes were NX, for NeXT
- meerita 6y agoI always wanted a SGI, but the price was so privative for me as a student. I learnt that those workstations got outdated really quick and cheap pc market was gaining more and more power competing with SGI until it was eaten totally.
- fit2rule 6y agoI collate a retro collection which includes a small portion of SGI machines. I'm still kind of astonished at what those humble little 100-megahertz MIPS things can do. It feels like it took serious chutzpah to build a 3D product suite on this platform .. but yet, SGI did okay for a while. I always wish they'd made a titanium laptop. If someone at SGI had any real artistic integrity, they would have done this the moment the world caught wind of Steve Jobs' fire at Apple 2.0 .. but yet again, another highly talented pool of people, subjugated to the military industrial complex, just sucked all the sex out of the box.
- cameldrv 6y agoThis is really the answer. From about 1990 to 1996, RISC workstations were several times faster than PCs, especially in floating point performance. However, when Intel came out with the Pentium Pro in 1995, it had better integer performance than almost all of the RISC chips and was about even on floating point. With Windows NT and Linux being viable operating systems for the sorts of applications people used workstations for, it was only a matter of time before workstations died out. The main thing holding back Intel machines by 1996 or so was software support for workstation type applications such as EDA and CAD tools, but this was sorted out within a few years. The last holdout was SGI, which was used in the visual effects industry, but NVIDIA caught up to them in about 1999 and SGI gave up on its performance leadership, and the applications followed.