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Sun has the best logo ever... But Intel didnt kill SGI, or MIPS for that matter. SGI killed themselves for a too-expensive-walled garden. I dont know who the

Sun has the best logo ever... But Intel didnt kill SGI, or MIPS for that matter. SGI killed themselves for a too-expensive-walled garden. I dont know who the industrial design team was at SGI for all their cases, but their cases are still legendary beautiful artifacts of computing (like CRAY) It sucks that FB now operates out of SUNs HQ... Fun fact ; when we designed the Lucas' Presidio Complex and moved ILM and other Lucas entities in there, they had a boatload of old SGI full rack machines (SGI machines that were the same size as a 42u cabinet) and several were turned into keggerators. Sadly I could have taken some of these amazing SGIs, but I was in an apartment in SF at the time and didnt have space for them.... it would have been worth it for me to rent a storage space and grab those machines... sadly many ~$500,000 SGI cabinets just went to the dump. (2004)

hulitu 4y ago
> But Intel didnt kill SGI, or MIPS for that matter. Itanium ?
- samstave 4y ago
  Pricing killed them, not Intel in specific....
- jabl 4y ago
  SGI managed to hang on for quite many years after their 3D graphics workstation market tanked by pivoting from Irix/MIPS to Linux/Itanium (later x86-64)(saving a lot of SW and HW development cost) and selling those big shared memory supercomputers. Sure, those were expensive boutique products, but they sat in their own niche that commodity HW couldn't easily touch. I think what ultimately doomed this was that with increasing core count CPU's the market that really needed much bigger shared memory systems became smaller and smaller. They were finally bought out by HPE, and while HPE still sells their Altix brand I hear the development of the shared memory supercomputer line has ended and now the Altix memory fabric has been utilized in the enterprise Superdome line.
DonHopkins 4y ago
Excerpt from my post about FORTH and Homer and Associates from the discussion of Forth vs Lisp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868 Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission: [...] Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc >First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan. >Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show that year. The year before the conference committee decided that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the film show. >Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together. [...] From the discussion of The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134114 That's right: Vaughan Pratt designed the original square Sun logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt And Sun Science Officer and Nixon Enemy John Gage is the genius who rotated it 45 degrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage Nixon Enemies List entry for John B. Gage: https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 Another one of the greatest logos of all time is the SGI logo, designed by none other than Scott Kim! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://scottkim.com/ https://scottkim.com/
- samstave 4y ago
  Thank you!!!
remote_phone 4y ago
No it absolutely was Intel/windows. If you remember correctly, once of their last ditch efforts to save the company was to ditch irix and sell windows machines on Intel. They used to own the high performance market. I remember because my dad was a researcher that bought a 250k SGI workstation to run simulations on in the late 1980s and that was the first time I had seen a laser mouse and I played with the flight simulator. But as high performance computing because more ubiquitous and cheaper they couldn’t compete and had to lower their prices until they went bankrupt.

hulitu 4y ago

> But Intel didnt kill SGI, or MIPS for that matter. Itanium ?

samstave 4y ago
Pricing killed them, not Intel in specific....
jabl 4y ago
SGI managed to hang on for quite many years after their 3D graphics workstation market tanked by pivoting from Irix/MIPS to Linux/Itanium (later x86-64)(saving a lot of SW and HW development cost) and selling those big shared memory supercomputers. Sure, those were expensive boutique products, but they sat in their own niche that commodity HW couldn't easily touch. I think what ultimately doomed this was that with increasing core count CPU's the market that really needed much bigger shared memory systems became smaller and smaller. They were finally bought out by HPE, and while HPE still sells their Altix brand I hear the development of the shared memory supercomputer line has ended and now the Altix memory fabric has been utilized in the enterprise Superdome line.

DonHopkins 4y ago

Excerpt from my post about FORTH and Homer and Associates from the discussion of Forth vs Lisp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868 Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission: [...] Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc >First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan. >Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show that year. The year before the conference committee decided that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the film show. >Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together. [...] From the discussion of The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134114 That's right: Vaughan Pratt designed the original square Sun logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt And Sun Science Officer and Nixon Enemy John Gage is the genius who rotated it 45 degrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage Nixon Enemies List entry for John B. Gage: https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 Another one of the greatest logos of all time is the SGI logo, designed by none other than Scott Kim! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://scottkim.com/ https://scottkim.com/

samstave 4y ago
Thank you!!!

remote_phone 4y ago

No it absolutely was Intel/windows. If you remember correctly, once of their last ditch efforts to save the company was to ditch irix and sell windows machines on Intel. They used to own the high performance market. I remember because my dad was a researcher that bought a 250k SGI workstation to run simulations on in the late 1980s and that was the first time I had seen a laser mouse and I played with the flight simulator. But as high performance computing because more ubiquitous and cheaper they couldn’t compete and had to lower their prices until they went bankrupt.