>SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. They were also insanely

>SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. They were also insanely expensive, affordable to only the wealthiest of established companies. A basic SGI workstation would cost as much as a sports car, and professional workstation as much as a house. At those prices they had better damn be beautiful and well built. In the early '00s ugly beige boxes with Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs running BSD, Windows NT and Linux started wiping the floor with those beautiful SGI workstations at only a fraction of the price, that it made SGI basically irrelevant overnight. It was a bloodbath. The only market they held onto for a little while were supercomputers and compute workstations for wealthy customers that were running massive simulations like oil & gas for which money was no abject. The VFX team of the original Matrix movie from 1999 was grateful they could save huge amounts of time and money by running their rendering pipeline on networked commodity Dell workstations with off the shelf Intel CPUs.[1] That was one of the last nails in SGIs coffin. [1] "Manex Visual Effects used 32 Dell Precision 410 Dual P-II/450 Processor systems running FreeBSD as the core CG Render Farm. Charles Henrich, the senior systems administrator at Manex, says, "We came to a point in the production where we realized we just did not have enough computing power on our existing SGI infrastructure to get through the 3-D intensive sequences. It was at that point we decided on going with a FreeBSD based solution, due to the ability to get the hardware quickly as well as the reliability and ease of administration that FreeBSD provides us. Working with Dell, we purchased 32 of these systems on a Wednesday, and had them rendering in production by Saturday afternoon. It was truly an amazing effort on everyone’s part, and I don’t believe it would’ve been possible had we chosen to go with any other Operating System solution." https://www.freebsd.org/press/press-rel-1/ https://www.freebsd.org/press/press-rel-1/