16 ms·

The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

346 points by BirAdam 3y ago

neduma 3y ago
Irix OS was my second best OS exposure after Ubuntu during college days.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  What did you do with it? I’ve always wanted to play with Irix . The UI looks very intuitive. The boxes are hard to find, so I went for emulation but I couldn’t get it any further than a boot screen in MAME.
davidw 3y ago
I remember having access to an Irix box at my first job. It was seen as a real, professional, serious OS, not like the Linux box I set up. Pretty incredible how that all changed in a matter of years.
kelsey98765431 3y ago
A close friend of mine growing up had a parent that worked at SGI. I'm not trying to start a holy war, but I just have to let it be known that emacs was the recommended editor at SGI. Just saying. Maybe other things contributed to the fall but, in my heart I will always remember emacs.
theideaofcoffee 3y ago
Oh how I lusted over the Challenges, the Octanes, the Indigo2s of the time. It was a revelation when I finally was able to sit down at a console of an Octane (with two, count 'em TWO R14000 and a whopping 2.6G of RAM), tooling around in IRIX via 4dwm was so much more satisfying than today's UIs. It was snappy and low-latency unlike anything I've used since. Later on, I was able to do some computational work on an Altix 3700 with 256 sockets and 512G of RAM spread over four full-height cabinets with the nest of NUMAlink cables at the back), at the time running SuSE linux and that was wild seeing the 256 sockets being printed out with a cat /proc/cpuinfo. Now the same capabilities are available in a 4U machine. The corporate lineage story is also just as interesting as the hardware they made as well. Acquisition, spinoff, acquisition, rename, acqusition, shutter, now perhaps just a few books and binders and memories in the few remaining personnal at HPE are all that's left (via Cray, via Tera, via SGI, via Cray Research). RIP SGI
- bitbckt 3y ago
  I still keep a maxed out Octane2 in running order for posterity. Occasionally logging in to it reminds me just how a desktop environment should feel. We truly have lost something since then.
  - ofrzeta 3y ago
    If you feel nostalgic you can run https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ on Linux.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  I really wish they'd do movies like they made for RIM about: Cray, DEC, Compaq, SGi, Pixar. sounds like these places were either wild or strait up IBM culture or some clash or both either inside or outside. Raven and id Software would be neat too. Westwood Studios.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I remember having a Personal Iris, at the company I worked at, and, later, an Indigo. We never used them. I think they were really there, to impress the visitors (They were in our showroom). I remember the colors as being very different, from the photos, though. The Personal Iris was a deep purplish-brown, and the Indigo was ... indigo. Jim Clark sounds like my kinda guy. I made a hash of my teenage years, and barely squeaked in, with a GED, myself. It has all worked out, OK, in the end, though.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > We never used them. When I was in high school we had a lab full of SGI machines. They also never got used. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing equipment, and probably that much again in software licenses (at the commercial rate), just sitting there doing nothing. It was heartbreaking. On a happy note, the SGI bus (a semi-trailer full of SGI machines demoing their capabilities) came to school one time. As a teenage nerd, getting to play with a refrigerator-sized Onyx2 was a good day.
  - mrpippy 3y ago
    My goodness, at a high school? Like Indys, or O2s? Was this a private school?
    - randomdata 3y ago
      They were O2s. Rural public school. There were all kinds of toys, though. There was a dedicated classroom setup for video-based remote learning some 30 years before COVID - that got used for one semester, from what I gather (was never used while I was there). The school was even host to a dialup ISP at one point. The administrators were all in on technology. The teachers, not so much... Eventually, in my last year, the government changed the funding model and the party ended.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  >The Personal Iris was a deep purplish-brown, and the Indigo was ... indigo. Nice. I once worked at a startup that had a Cobalt Qube in the server room, and the Cobalt was ... cobalt blue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cobalt_Qube_3_Front.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cobalt_Qube_3_Front.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube
jefflinwood 3y ago
I worked on the SGI campus as a consultant/vendor to them in 1999/2000 during the dot.com boom. I really wanted one of those 1600SW flat screens (everything was CRT back then), but they weren't really in use at the time. One of the neatest things is that they let us (Trilogy/pcOrder) put together a sand volleyball team to compete in their company intramurals. Their cafeteria was also top notch.
- dekhn 3y ago
  That cafeteria went on to be known as "Charlie's" at Google and was the main HQ cafeteria (serving great food, and then later, extremely meh food). TGIF was also held there. If there ever was a place that was "Google central", that was it.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    >"Charlie's" , and its chef, Charlie, are mentioned in the book called The Google Story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Story
tombert 3y ago
There's a few cases in the history of computers where it feels like the world just "chose wrong". One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time, but for market-force reasons that depress me, Commodore isn't the "Apple" of today. Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers. Irix was a really cool OS, and 4Dwm was pretty nice to use and play with. It makes me sad that they beaten by Apple.
- deleted 3y ago
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- causi 3y ago
  "Revolutionaries rarely get to live in the societies they created" I think it's a combination of a skillset/culture needed to create a paradigm shift isn't the same one needed to compete with others on a playing field you built, and of complacency. It happens over an over. We saw it happen with RIM, and we're watching it happen right now with Prusa Research.
  - itronitron 3y ago
    Both Prusa and SGI are (and were) probably largely unknown to 90% of their potential market. The globally recognized companies tend to spend far more on marketing than anyone in a STEM field would consider remotely reasonable.
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      True. In the early to middle days of Java, I read that Sun spent millions of dollars on marketing it, and related stuff around it.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers. I think you highlighted very correctly there, though, why SGI lost. It turned out there were cheaper options, which while not on par with SGI workstations initially, just improved at a faster rate than SGI and eventually ended up with a much better cost/functionality profile. I feel like SGI just bet wrong. The article talks about how they acquired Cray, which were originally these awesome supercomputers. But it turned out supercomputers essentially got replaced by giant networks of much lower cost PCs.
rongenre 3y ago
I played with SGI machines in college and they felt like.. the future. I really hoped they would hire me when I graduated. Incredible, though, how the relatively cheaper Windows NT machines and 3dfx cards and graphics software just killed them. I was a little sad when I wandered around the campus of an employer in Mountain View and noticed the fading sign that had what was left of the SGI logo.
- jandrese 3y ago
  The awesome old cube logo or the new "we spent millions of dollars on a professional marketing department to design a new logo" that is just the initials in a boring font and off center? I co-oped for SGI onsite in the sales/marketing/support for a major ISP of the day back in the late 90s and the buzz around the office was that the company (at this point experimenting with overpriced Windows NT boxes and generic Linux servers) was experiencing massive brain drain to some brand new startup that was going to make something called a "GeForce" card for cheap PCs that was going to avoid the pitfalls of the then popular Voodoo cards. Apparently the engineers were unhappy with the direction the company was taking under the new leadership and thought that there was still an interest in graphics acceleration.
  - mrpippy 3y ago
    The "sgi" logo was a big step down from the cube, but it was a lot more attractive than the Rackable/Silicon Graphics International "sgi" logo that looked like a cheap knockoff of the previous one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International
    - theideaofcoffee 3y ago
      It really was a letdown when Rackable resurrected SGI and then brought about that ... thing of a logo. It just felt it hollowed out the brand even more, even if SGI itself was still making some interesting hardware at the time-namely the Altix 4700, UV and ICE, the soul just wasn't there anymore.
  - 3y ago
davepeck 3y ago
I was there near the end. First, as a summer intern in 1998, and then in 1999 as a full time engineer on what is now Google's Mountain View campus. SGI had always been a dream company for me. I'd first learned about them in high school; now, right out of college, I'd somehow managed to land a dream job. SGI's hardware was cutting-edge and exotic. IRIX was killer (sorry Solaris). Cray was a subdivision. My coworkers used emacs, too. They put an O2 on my desk! The dream didn't last long. Major layoffs hit just a few months after I started full time. I wrote about the experience here: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/ https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/
- mrpippy 3y ago
  What did you work on at SGI during your brief stint?
  - davepeck 3y ago
    MineSet, their data mining and visualization package.
    - bcantrill 3y ago
      If a may, can I fact check a story conveyed to me through a mutual acquaintance of ours? The story was that SGI was trying to sell off MineSet, and needed the team to stick around long enough to sell them off -- so a bonus was to be given after a short period of time (a month maybe?). The bonus was significant enough to get people to at least defer a job search ($10K?), but SGI didn't manage to find a buyer. The check was to hit bank accounts on a particular day; the team waited to hear word that the literal money was in the bank -- and then all quit simultaneously. Is there at least some truthiness to it? Or has this just become Silicon Valley urban legend in my head?
      - davepeck 3y ago
        That rings a bell although fuzzily: as the new kid from school, I was pretty disconnected from the politics of the moment. I do seem to remember that the MineSet team departed en masse, but IIRC that departure roughly coincided with broader layoffs in the org. (With apologies for reviving 90s IRIX/Solaris snark in my earlier post. :-)
assimpleaspossi 3y ago
I was a system engineer for SGI in 1992 working mainly with McDonnell-Douglas in St Louis. It was thrilling to be sitting in the cafeteria and have Jim Clark plop down next to me for lunch. Just one of the guys. As an outsider--cause I didn't live and work in California--this was the go-go atmosphere of such companies back then where they thought they could do no wrong. And the after work parties were wild (how the heck do you break off half a toilet bowl?). One of the buildings had plastic over the windows cause that's where they were working on the plugin GL card for the PC. (Ssh! No one's supposed to know that!) Being the first system engineer in St Louis, my eyes lit up when my manager told me he had ordered an 16-core machine for my office--just for me! I was hired as a video expert. The company re-org'ed and my new boss decided he needed a Fortran expert so that was the end of my job with SGI.
ponhfgy 3y ago
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ponhfgy 3y ago
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johndhi 3y ago
When I was a kid I remember my brother and I asking my dad a ton of questions about SG. We viewed them as this amazing awesome company that made cool looking towers and the fastest computers in the world.
matthewmcg 3y ago
Much of this history is also described in Michael Lewis’s book the New New Thing (2000) which profiles Clark and his various ventures. It’s really a snapshot of pre-.com crash Silicon Valley.
- CalChris 3y ago
  My takeaway from that book was that Clark invented the dot com.
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mobilio 3y ago
This was explained here: https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-1/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-2/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-3/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-4/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-5/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/05/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-epilogue/ https://vizworld.com/2009/05/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-epi...
dekhn 3y ago
I was in love with SGI when I was an undergraduate just over the hill at UC Santa Cruz in the early to mid 90s. Everything about the machines from their industrial designed cases but wonderfully colorful cases, and the sexy desktop OS ("This is UNIX. I know this!") and the way IrisGL rendered molecular graphics. Driving to a Phish show at Shoreline, we passed the low-slung office buildings of SGI which seemed like the sexiest place to work. When I graduated, I thought I was "too dumb in CS" to get a job in Mountain View and went to grad school in biophysics instead. By the time I was a few years into grad school, I worked in a computer graphics lab outfitted with Reality Monsters and Octanes and other high end SGIs (when you maxxed out an SGI's graphics and RAM, they were really fast). I was porting molecular graphics code to Linux using Mesa (much to the derision of the SGI fans in the lab). When we got a FireGL2 card it had a linux driver and could do reasonable molecular graphics in real time and the SGI folks looked real scared (especially because the SGI Visual Workstation had just come out and was a very expensive turkey). Less than a decade after that I was working in those very buildings for Google. Google took over SGI's old HQ (Jeff Dean told me there was a period where Google and SGI overlapped in the GooglePlex and the SGI folks looked very sad as they paid for their lunches and teh googlers got free food). There was still plenty of SGI signage strewn about. And now Google has gone dumb and also built their own HQ next door (note the correlation between large SV companies building overly fancy HQs and then going out of business). Such is the cycle of sexy tech.
- dalke 3y ago
  We've talked before about our respective molecular graphics background. I started with Unix on a Personal IRIS as an undergrad working in a physics lab which used it for imaging capture and analysis. I was the nominal sys admin, with one semester of Minix under my belt and just enough to be dangerous. (I once removed /bin/cc because I thought it was possible to undelete, like on DOS. I had to ask around the meteorology department for a restore tape.) The summer before grad school I got a job at the local supercomputing center to work on a parallelization of CHARMm, using PVM. I developed it on that PI, and on a NeXT. That's also when I learned about people at my future grad school working on VR for molecular visualization, in a 1992 CACM article. So when I started looking for an advisor, that's the lab I chose, and I became the junior co-author and eventual lead developer of VMD. With a Crimson as my desktop machine, a lab full of SGIs and NeXTs, and the CAVE VR setup elsewhere in the building. Heady times. I visited SGI in 1995 or so, on holiday, thinking that would be a great place to work. They even had an Inventor plugin for molecular visualization, so I thought it would be a good lead. I emailed and got an invited to visit, where the host kindly told me that they were not going to do more in molecular visualization because they wanted to provide the hardware everyone uses, and not compete in that software space. In the early 1990s SGIs dominated molecular modeling (replacing Evans & Sutherland), so naturally the related tools, like molecular dynamics codes, also ran on them. But we started migrating to distributed computing, where it didn't make sense to have 16 expensive SGIs, leaving them more as the head .. which as you pointed out, was soon able to run just fine on a Linux machine.
latchkey 3y ago
Back in 1993, I was in college and working for the extended education department running their all their computer infrastructure. One day, someone wheeled this approx. 3x3 foot sized box to my door and asked me if I wanted it. It was a SGI Onyx with a giant monitor sitting on top, with a keyboard and mouse. I plugged it in and it sounded like an airplane taking off. It immediately heated up my entire tiny office. It was the 4th Unix I had ever played with (Ultrix, NeXT and A/UX were previous ones). It had some cool games on it, but beyond that, at the time, I had no use for it because A/UX on my Quadra950, was so much more fun to play with. I don't even think I ever opened it up to look at it. I don't know what I was thinking. lol. After realizing it did not have much going for it, I ended up just turning it on when the office was cold and using it as a foot rest. Oh yea, found a video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  Holy shit, that thing is amazing compared to the computers I had access to in the early 90s
nonrandomstring 3y ago
I agree that these machines and their OS were too proprietary and over-engineered to weather the PC revolution. But when I think back to my days using Suns and SG (Indigo) the memory feels like driving a Rolls Royce or Daimler with leather seats and walnut panels.
Uhhrrr 3y ago
The article doesn't mention the reason for the fall: less good but cheaper competitors. First Sun, then Windows NT and Linux.
- cf100clunk 3y ago
  > The article doesn't mention the reason for the fall: less good but cheaper competitors The article has this: ''As Bob Bishop took the reigns of SGI, things looked dark. AMD announced their 64 bit architecture in October, PC graphics had made massive strides while remaining significantly less expensive than SGI’s offerings, NT was proving to be a solid and less expensive competitor to UNIX, Linux was eating away at traditional UNIX market segments, and Itanium still hadn’t launched.'' I can agree with almost all of that statement but I object to the ''NT was proving to be a solid and less expensive competitor to UNIX'' part as mostly false in any mixed OS environment over which I'd ever been admin.
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    Well, do remember the cost of a UNIX license at the time (unless you were using BSD). If you didn’t have thousands of dollars on hand, NT was a good choice.
  - Uhhrrr 3y ago
    But that's 1999, and they were already losing money in 1997, and the article doesn't say why. Sun was why.
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  Look harder
browningstreet 3y ago
I had an Indigo2 on my desk in college. I moved back and forth between that an a NeXT cube that a colleague had in their lab. The NeXT was nice but SLOW. The Indigo2 wasn't especially fast but it was nice and could do visual things that just weren't available as readily on our alternatives. We had SunOS and Solaris systems that were mostly used for network and engineering projects, and I was engaged in some visualization work. When the O2 was announced I was quite sure it would be the solution to our speed issues.. around the same time, another colleague was the first to install a beta of Win95, and it did seem awfully pretty.
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ThinkBeat 3y ago
I remember when we got the first Indys at the uni. That was magic like. People nearly got into physical fights to use one of them. People came in at night to use them as well. I wonder if the uni is so locked down now that students can sit in the lab all night. Being a bit pragmatic in getting my actual thesis done I discovered that there was all of a sudden, a lot more resources available on one of the (older) Sun servers. It saved me days if not weeks.
vondur 3y ago
It's pretty simple why these Unix vendors all died. Linux and Intel chips. Sure you could get a really nice Sun system at the time with all of the redundancy tech built in, which cost around $50k. Or you can go and get 4 or 5 Linux servers from Dell running RedHat which by the early 2000's were faster too.
KineticLensman 3y ago
They had me at ‘Skywriter Reality Engine’. I’d used vaxen at Uni in the 80s, then got into industry using Symbolics Lisp machines, then had several dark years programming on DOS boxes. The return to a truly innovative workstation blew my mind
sneed_chucker 3y ago
I remember to thank SGI every time I format an XFS filesystem.
- betaby 3y ago
  Yes, XFS has been in the Linux kernel since 2001! Time flies.
martinpw 3y ago
Whenever this topic comes up there are always comments saying that SGI was taken by surprise by cheap hardware and if only they had seen it coming they could have prepared for it and managed it. I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma", which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.
- szundi 3y ago
  Thanks for this comment, very much appreciated.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Having worked longtime for a minicomputer company--which actually survived longer than most mostly because of some storage innovations along with some high-end Unix initiatives--it's really hard. You can't really kick a huge existing business to the curb. Or otherwise say we're going to largely start over. Kodak was not actually in a position to be big in digital. And, of course, the digital camera manufacturers mostly got eclipsed by smartphones anyway a decade or so later.
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    Data General?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Yes. CLARiiON eventually enabled a sale to EMC (which arguably saved EMC for a time) and the Unix business (especially NUMA servers) were sufficient revenue producers for a while to keep the lights on. ThinLiiNe (or whatever the capitalization was) never went anywhere but neither did a lot of things in the dot.com era.
      - 3y ago
Keyframe 3y ago
Steve Jobs on Silicon Graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE
Apocryphon 3y ago
Low-key iconic machines, Hollywood kept putting them in movies. http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/index.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/index.html https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html#SGI https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html#SGI
pjmlp 3y ago
A bit of trivia, SGI used to host the C++ STL documentation based on HP libraries, pre-adoption into the standard.
timthorn 3y ago
I miss SGI for many reasons, but their industrial design (and that of pre-HPE Cray) is one of the big ones. The 19" rack form factor is the shipping container of the computing world - practical, standardised, sensible... and dull. The variety in enclosures matched the novelty in architectures of the period. Exciting times to be part of.
vrinsd 3y ago
I believe nVidia was started with a lot of SGI's core technology ; not "I have a good idea and I can't do it here" and more like "let me just take this stuff I doubt anyone will notice". I think SGI sued but didn't really pursue the matter because they didn't really see nVidia as a threat. I think Jensen was pivotal in this "technology transfer". Regarding computing cycles, boom/bust, I recently re-read Soul of New Machine and was struck by how much the world has NOT changed. Sure we're not talking about micro/mini-computers and writing micro-coded assembly but the whole "the market is pivoting and we need to ride this wave" and "work like a dog to meet some almost unobtainum goal" seems to still underpin being an engineer in "tech" today.
- miohtama 3y ago
  The Nvidia lawsuit is discussed in the article.
  - _DeadFred_ 3y ago
    I mean there's more to it. NVidia literally just took SGI's IP. Only more blatant start was Cisco, where they straight stole a University computer.
    - meekaaku 3y ago
      where can i read about this cisco thing?
      - vrinsd 3y ago
        https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/ https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/
    - takinola 3y ago
      Cisco was started by a husband/wife team who were the heads of IT for the Stanford Electrical Engineering School and Business School respectively. Anecdotally, they first developed the technology trying to connect the networks for both schools.
sgt 3y ago
The article went very quick from rowdy teen throwing smoke bombs to... boom, he has a PhD in Computer Science. Really interesting article that goes into depth regarding the SGI products. I didn't know Clark basically invented the GPU. Speaking of exotic hardware, I'm actually sitting next to an SGI O2 (currently powered off). A beautiful machine!
cellularmitosis 3y ago
There's a kid on youtube (username 'dodoid') who put together a series of videos on SGI. Neat to see someone young get super enthusiastic about computing history.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I was at SGI and left with Clark to Netscape. That was a fun time in my career. That was also a time that it became clear SGI was about to explode as commodity GPUs were being developed by former SGI engineers and the core SGI graphics teams were attritting hard. Fun to read this story again and learn some of the things that happened later.
alecco 3y ago
Interesting insider comment from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30920824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30920824
jibbit 3y ago
i'll never forget my 1st time coming into a high end Flame suite. it was so exciting.. i don't think i could have been more excited if you'd told me i was stepping into the worlds first time machine
canucker2016 3y ago
There's the "SGI Irix bloat" internal email that got posted to Usenet. Took me awhile to find a copy on the net, https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.txt https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.t... Here's a formatted-for-HTML version: http://www.art.net/%7Ehopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html http://www.art.net/%7Ehopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarras...
- icedchai 3y ago
  Meanwhile, today, we have chat applications taking up almost a gig of memory...
cf100clunk 3y ago
I'd never met Rick Belluzzo, but having known SGI insiders of his era I gathered that he'd driven the company strongly towards NT on x86 at the cost/risk of losing their corporate and personal UNIX competencies, causing some internal outrage. When his time was up at SGI he quickly popped up at Microsoft running MSN in what I saw as a synecure meant as a pat on the back for a job well done. Am I right on this?
- shrubble 3y ago
  That is a widely held view among Unix nerds like me, at least.
  - jra_samba 3y ago
    My recollection of that time (I was at SGI when Belluzzo was there). https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-fyi-this-is-my-recollection-activity-7153117822452158464-60MO?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-f...
Keyframe 3y ago
It still has that cachet with, well a bit older generation. I have an Indy and Indigo2 (purple - max impact one) and when someone visit and sees the machines it's like you sprawled a vintage ferrari in (our) eyes. I don't think there's anything comparable today when we have it all. I demonstrated IRIX to younger colleagues and it was - ok, so it's alright I guess, like anything else we have today? Yep.. but contemporary world was NOT like that. I had an Octane as well, heavy and loud beast. All in storage now waiting for move. In late 90s I worked a lot on SGI machines (vfx).
Arathorn 3y ago
There's a surprising amount of good info here about very first IRISes. I ended up with 3 of the very first IRIS 1400 workstations mentioned in the post which NASA Ames bought; at least one of which is still in working order. They were my first unix workstations (running a Unisoft-based sysv/bsd hybrid pre-IRIX variant), and is where I first learnt UNIX, C, IRIS GL, vi and lots of other good stuff. Irritatingly they shipped with an XNS rather than TCP/IP network stack (although I did get hold of a beta IP stack, I never got it work). I did get XNS working on a LAN using their EXOS 101 ethernet cards tho. In case anyone's interested, their graphics card (GE1, the world's first ever hardware 3D graphics card?) looks like: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/matrix.org/cRPawSGJrwDJeLIbGawWgPlz https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/m... ...and the PM2 68k processor card mentioned in the post looks like: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/matrix.org/jeaTvJJSnmdXsVhVwMOCzxsI https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/m... ...and one of the machines itself looks like: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/matrix.org/RSqYGIISgsYdPTqYznDnqsyD https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/m... Suffice it to say that I have a very soft spot for these machines :)
danans 3y ago
> On the 10th of July in 2003, SGI vacated and leased their headquarters to Google. I was around to witness the he tail end of that office space transition (on the incoming side at Google). It was surreal to be sitting in the physical carcass of a company I had long fantasized about (in part due to their marketing via Hollywood). In retrospect it was ironic because a company that was based on selling very expensive high performance compute (SGI) was being physically replaced by a company selling (albeit indirectly) very cheap high performance compute.
paul_mark 3y ago
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ben7799 3y ago
I was kind of right the exact age to see all this happen all while I was in college. Fall 95 enter freshman year and we had Indys and IBM RS6000s as the main workstations on campus. Really great setup where you could sit at any workstation and all your stuff just worked and your whole environment seamlessly migrated. The only thing you had to do was if you were compiling your own stuff you'd have to recompile it for the machine you sat down at. SGI brought a demo truck to campus in the spring of my Freshman year (Spring 96) and blew us all away. They were there for interviews, obviously I was a freshman but we all went to check it out. Summer 96 I get an internship and for kicks they gave me an Indy with a 21" CRT (huge at the time) and the silly video camera that was like 10+ years ahead of it's time. Fall 96 we got labs full of O2s. Fall 1997 I bought a 3DFX card. MS/Intel somehow made a donation to the school and got them to start phasing out the Unix workstations. The windows NT setup was terrible, they never had the printing and seamless movement of files down till after I graduated. Video games in the Fall of 1997 on the 3DFX were basically as impressive as the demos on the $100k refrigerator sized machine SGI showed in 1995. Probably fall 1998 I remember my Dad got a computer with an Nvidia Riva 128. Spring 99 I graduated and that fall I rebuilt my PC with a Geforce 256. I'm not sure when I last saw an SGI, but I did briefly use one of their NT machines IIRC. Last time I had a Sun machine at work was probably 2004. I remember maybe 2007-2008 at work deciding for the first time we were going to support Linux, then by 2010-11 we had dropped support for Sun. Most of the commercial Unix workstations had tons of Unix annoyances I never found Linux to have. Irix was maybe the best. HP-UX was super annoying I remember. I didn't use DEC Unix and Tru64 much. Closed source PC Unix like SCO I remember being horrible.
fuzztester 3y ago
This reminds me of the book The Soul of a New Machine.
temporarely 3y ago
We had a few SGI boxes in arch school (for cad). I learned C++ on those boxes (the GL api, which I thought was beautiful btw). But the main attraction were the two demos (this is '91-2): the flight simulator was awesome and there was this deconstructing cube thing that was pretty wild as well. Compared to what was on PCs those days those SGI machines were truly dazzling.
rdtsc 3y ago
> announcing SGI’s intent to migrate to Itanium (and collaborating on projects Monterey and Trillian) while simultaneously launching an IA-32 series of machines running NT known as the Visual Workstation. That's pretty wild, I had completely forgotten about that. It was too late of course by then. I was working at a CAD/CAE the company which leased SGI workstations in the early 2000s. Was just a fresh grad wondering why were they leasing them, then realized they were more expensive than some cars. Some of the developers were starting to use NT workstation with 3D graphics, they were not cheap, but they could run circles around Octanes and Indigos at a fraction of the cost. They were rushing to port everything to NT as writing had been on the wall for a while by then.
junar 3y ago
I wish the author had shown their work regarding the mother's after-tax income. They apparently assume a 22% effective tax rate, but that seems unrealistically high. The SSA says that Social Security tax was a mere 1% before 1950, and would remain below 4% until the 1970s. [1] A 1949 Form 1040 [2] suggests that a single filer with 3 dependent children, earning $2700 that year, would have a federal income tax liability of only $7. Not 7 percent, 7 dollars. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/taxRates.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/taxRates.html [2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--1949.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--1949.pdf
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
>Nintendo 64 was an SGI workstation with ... 4MB of Rambus DRAM at 250 MHz (actually 4.5MB but 512K is visible only to the GPU) It was actually 9-bit RAM, but the CPU could only see 8 of the bits!
AlbertCory 3y ago
The ONLY companies that last more than a generation or two are family-owned. https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/whats-missing-with-american-ceos https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/whats-missing-with-ameri... There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, "professional management" just does not survive for very long.
mvkel 3y ago
"it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." If you're the incumbent, a paradigm shift usually forces you to intentionally cannibalize your existing revenue base in service of the not-yet-proven new thing. That's if you want to survive. It's incredibly difficult, rare, nearly impossible, to pull such a thing off within a company system. Imagine being Blockbuster, knowing that to survive, you'd need to transition to a content streaming company. That's a ton to unwind before you can even buy servers, let alone hire the people to -lead the industry- in such a shift. All to simply remain alive.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
I remember the nVidia CEO saying that nVidia is a software company. Whereas SGI thought of itself as a hardware company. That's why SGI is gone, and nVidia is still making the best graphics hardware.
fernly 3y ago
I appreciate the article. As a lowly member of technical staff 92-97 I didn't see or understand a fraction of this. I *loved* my Indy workstation and the IRIX desktop UI, and I admired the brilliance of some of the engineers I worked with. Remember the Lavarand[1]? Random number generator based on an array of lava lamps? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand
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TacticalCoder 3y ago
The 'G' in SGI is basically the same 'G' as in GPU. Had SGI still rocked the world, today they'd be at the forefront of AI. All the models would be trained on and run on SGI computers. The attack on SGI didn't only happen on the lame Windows side, with their crappy software and ultra lame 3D software (compared to what SGI had), which people would love because their lameness was matched by their ultra-cheap pricepoint. The attack on SGI also came from open-source and Linux: cheap commodity hardware that'd run both mediocre but ubiquitous commercial software and the very same cheap commodity hardware that'd run Linux. On which OS are most (all?) AI models trained today? What OS powers 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers? Linux. That's the tragedy of SGI: as if cheap commodity x86 hardware wasn't enough, they got then attacked by both Windows and Linux on that cheap hardware. P.S: as a sidenote my best friend (still best friend to this day)'s stepfather was the head of SGI Benelux (Belgium/The Netherlands/Luxembourg) so my friend had this SGI Indy (the "pizza tower" one) at his home. Guess what we'd do every day after school?
krylon 3y ago
One thing that set SGI apart from the rest was that their cases were so incredibly pretty. Even today, the most beautiful PC cases barely play in the same league (IMHO). When Apple started building those colorful cases around ~2000, they reached that level of aesthetic appeal, but then they went for brushed metal (which is also very pretty, but not that pretty, IMHO). Had one of the major PC vendors hired their designers and built just run-of-the-mill PCs, housing them in those amazing cases, I wonder how that would have worked out.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  Interesting - some of them look neat, sure, but they also look fairly cheap. The O2 especially. The construction certainly isn't high quality, they're just stamped coil steel boxes with plastic wrapped around them. Some OEMs still do this, like this Alienware, which is just a squared-off miditower dressed up in a plastic shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1dlVPzUVo&t=8m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1dlVPzUVo&t=8m10s Of course in the 90s this would've been quite modern I imagine, considering that the competition was gray painted steel boxes and steel cabinets with a gray powder coat.
pixelpoet 3y ago
Random trivia which will likely get buried but whatever: the rendering software Octane Render got its name from my refusing to let the author use my rendering software's name, and he had some historical beef with us, the two devs of Indigo Renderer, so he named his renderer after the SGI machine that came after the Indigo, Octane. He also leant his SGI Indigo2 to the LGR guy on YouTube, and he did a great video on it: https://youtu.be/ZDxLa6P6exc https://youtu.be/ZDxLa6P6exc
selimthegrim 3y ago
The article is a little imprecise, though. Clark enrolled in the night school at Tulane, which is what is now called the School of Professional Advancement, not the regular school.
masfoobar 3y ago
I was about 10 years old when films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park came out. Although I had games consoles I never had a proper computer. I had friends who owned an Amiga or Amstrad but they always wanted to come to mine and play Sega or Nintendo. Being into art at the time, was facinated with Silicon Graphics computers. If I could "wish" a xmas present, it would have been (something like) an SGI Indigo2 system. It wasn't long before a 486-PC entered our home. It was certainly a learning experience trying to get Windows 3.1 to work but it was DooM that completely changed my views on video games. I never expected graphics to make such a huge leap when I considered Mortal Kombat 2 to be peak graphics! How game graphics changed for the rest of the 90s is insane!!! When the Nintendo 64 came about (originally Ultra 64 and Project Reality) I honestly had a childish attitude that NOTHING would touch it for a long time because it was SGI under the hood! In defence of my childish attitude, I was still a child. The harsh reality is... by the time the Nintendo 64 was on the shelves I knew it was already "old tech" after watching (and playing) a demo of Tomb Raider 2 in a computer shop. It was likely a Pentium 90 mhz computer with Windows 95, maybe 500GB Hard drive space and running on VooDoo graphics. Once you get over the awesome graphics you realise that these machines can be anywhere from £600-£1500. My defensive side kicks in... but.. but.. SGI is still better, right? They cost so much more they are not about games, they are for Hollywood movies! A year or two after, seeing what 3D animation software can do... wouldn't be surprised if rendering speed was competitive on Windows 98 machines to SGI ones. Move on to today. Our phones are more powerful than those really expensive SGI systems from 1992. It is crazy when you think about it.
thewileyone 3y ago
Wow, this article brought back memories I'd forgotten. I applied for an internship at Wavefront Technologies in Santa Barbara back in the 90's. I was so impressed with their offices and the SGI boxes they were using.

346 points by BirAdam 3y ago

neduma 3y ago

Irix OS was my second best OS exposure after Ubuntu during college days.

HeckFeck 3y ago
What did you do with it? I’ve always wanted to play with Irix . The UI looks very intuitive. The boxes are hard to find, so I went for emulation but I couldn’t get it any further than a boot screen in MAME.

davidw 3y ago

I remember having access to an Irix box at my first job. It was seen as a real, professional, serious OS, not like the Linux box I set up. Pretty incredible how that all changed in a matter of years.

kelsey98765431 3y ago

A close friend of mine growing up had a parent that worked at SGI. I'm not trying to start a holy war, but I just have to let it be known that emacs was the recommended editor at SGI. Just saying. Maybe other things contributed to the fall but, in my heart I will always remember emacs.

theideaofcoffee 3y ago

Oh how I lusted over the Challenges, the Octanes, the Indigo2s of the time. It was a revelation when I finally was able to sit down at a console of an Octane (with two, count 'em TWO R14000 and a whopping 2.6G of RAM), tooling around in IRIX via 4dwm was so much more satisfying than today's UIs. It was snappy and low-latency unlike anything I've used since. Later on, I was able to do some computational work on an Altix 3700 with 256 sockets and 512G of RAM spread over four full-height cabinets with the nest of NUMAlink cables at the back), at the time running SuSE linux and that was wild seeing the 256 sockets being printed out with a cat /proc/cpuinfo. Now the same capabilities are available in a 4U machine. The corporate lineage story is also just as interesting as the hardware they made as well. Acquisition, spinoff, acquisition, rename, acqusition, shutter, now perhaps just a few books and binders and memories in the few remaining personnal at HPE are all that's left (via Cray, via Tera, via SGI, via Cray Research). RIP SGI

bitbckt 3y ago
I still keep a maxed out Octane2 in running order for posterity. Occasionally logging in to it reminds me just how a desktop environment should feel. We truly have lost something since then.
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  If you feel nostalgic you can run https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ on Linux.
hypercube33 3y ago
I really wish they'd do movies like they made for RIM about: Cray, DEC, Compaq, SGi, Pixar. sounds like these places were either wild or strait up IBM culture or some clash or both either inside or outside. Raven and id Software would be neat too. Westwood Studios.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I remember having a Personal Iris, at the company I worked at, and, later, an Indigo. We never used them. I think they were really there, to impress the visitors (They were in our showroom). I remember the colors as being very different, from the photos, though. The Personal Iris was a deep purplish-brown, and the Indigo was ... indigo. Jim Clark sounds like my kinda guy. I made a hash of my teenage years, and barely squeaked in, with a GED, myself. It has all worked out, OK, in the end, though.

randomdata 3y ago
> We never used them. When I was in high school we had a lab full of SGI machines. They also never got used. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing equipment, and probably that much again in software licenses (at the commercial rate), just sitting there doing nothing. It was heartbreaking. On a happy note, the SGI bus (a semi-trailer full of SGI machines demoing their capabilities) came to school one time. As a teenage nerd, getting to play with a refrigerator-sized Onyx2 was a good day.
- mrpippy 3y ago
  My goodness, at a high school? Like Indys, or O2s? Was this a private school?
  - randomdata 3y ago
    They were O2s. Rural public school. There were all kinds of toys, though. There was a dedicated classroom setup for video-based remote learning some 30 years before COVID - that got used for one semester, from what I gather (was never used while I was there). The school was even host to a dialup ISP at one point. The administrators were all in on technology. The teachers, not so much... Eventually, in my last year, the government changed the funding model and the party ended.
fuzztester 3y ago
>The Personal Iris was a deep purplish-brown, and the Indigo was ... indigo. Nice. I once worked at a startup that had a Cobalt Qube in the server room, and the Cobalt was ... cobalt blue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cobalt_Qube_3_Front.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cobalt_Qube_3_Front.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube

jefflinwood 3y ago

I worked on the SGI campus as a consultant/vendor to them in 1999/2000 during the dot.com boom. I really wanted one of those 1600SW flat screens (everything was CRT back then), but they weren't really in use at the time. One of the neatest things is that they let us (Trilogy/pcOrder) put together a sand volleyball team to compete in their company intramurals. Their cafeteria was also top notch.

dekhn 3y ago
That cafeteria went on to be known as "Charlie's" at Google and was the main HQ cafeteria (serving great food, and then later, extremely meh food). TGIF was also held there. If there ever was a place that was "Google central", that was it.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  >"Charlie's" , and its chef, Charlie, are mentioned in the book called The Google Story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Story

tombert 3y ago

There's a few cases in the history of computers where it feels like the world just "chose wrong". One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time, but for market-force reasons that depress me, Commodore isn't the "Apple" of today. Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers. Irix was a really cool OS, and 4Dwm was pretty nice to use and play with. It makes me sad that they beaten by Apple.

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causi 3y ago
"Revolutionaries rarely get to live in the societies they created" I think it's a combination of a skillset/culture needed to create a paradigm shift isn't the same one needed to compete with others on a playing field you built, and of complacency. It happens over an over. We saw it happen with RIM, and we're watching it happen right now with Prusa Research.
- itronitron 3y ago
  Both Prusa and SGI are (and were) probably largely unknown to 90% of their potential market. The globally recognized companies tend to spend far more on marketing than anyone in a STEM field would consider remotely reasonable.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    True. In the early to middle days of Java, I read that Sun spent millions of dollars on marketing it, and related stuff around it.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers. I think you highlighted very correctly there, though, why SGI lost. It turned out there were cheaper options, which while not on par with SGI workstations initially, just improved at a faster rate than SGI and eventually ended up with a much better cost/functionality profile. I feel like SGI just bet wrong. The article talks about how they acquired Cray, which were originally these awesome supercomputers. But it turned out supercomputers essentially got replaced by giant networks of much lower cost PCs.

rongenre 3y ago

I played with SGI machines in college and they felt like.. the future. I really hoped they would hire me when I graduated. Incredible, though, how the relatively cheaper Windows NT machines and 3dfx cards and graphics software just killed them. I was a little sad when I wandered around the campus of an employer in Mountain View and noticed the fading sign that had what was left of the SGI logo.

jandrese 3y ago
The awesome old cube logo or the new "we spent millions of dollars on a professional marketing department to design a new logo" that is just the initials in a boring font and off center? I co-oped for SGI onsite in the sales/marketing/support for a major ISP of the day back in the late 90s and the buzz around the office was that the company (at this point experimenting with overpriced Windows NT boxes and generic Linux servers) was experiencing massive brain drain to some brand new startup that was going to make something called a "GeForce" card for cheap PCs that was going to avoid the pitfalls of the then popular Voodoo cards. Apparently the engineers were unhappy with the direction the company was taking under the new leadership and thought that there was still an interest in graphics acceleration.
- mrpippy 3y ago
  The "sgi" logo was a big step down from the cube, but it was a lot more attractive than the Rackable/Silicon Graphics International "sgi" logo that looked like a cheap knockoff of the previous one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International
  - theideaofcoffee 3y ago
    It really was a letdown when Rackable resurrected SGI and then brought about that ... thing of a logo. It just felt it hollowed out the brand even more, even if SGI itself was still making some interesting hardware at the time-namely the Altix 4700, UV and ICE, the soul just wasn't there anymore.
- 3y ago

davepeck 3y ago

I was there near the end. First, as a summer intern in 1998, and then in 1999 as a full time engineer on what is now Google's Mountain View campus. SGI had always been a dream company for me. I'd first learned about them in high school; now, right out of college, I'd somehow managed to land a dream job. SGI's hardware was cutting-edge and exotic. IRIX was killer (sorry Solaris). Cray was a subdivision. My coworkers used emacs, too. They put an O2 on my desk! The dream didn't last long. Major layoffs hit just a few months after I started full time. I wrote about the experience here: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/ https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/

mrpippy 3y ago
What did you work on at SGI during your brief stint?
- davepeck 3y ago
  MineSet, their data mining and visualization package.
  - bcantrill 3y ago
    If a may, can I fact check a story conveyed to me through a mutual acquaintance of ours? The story was that SGI was trying to sell off MineSet, and needed the team to stick around long enough to sell them off -- so a bonus was to be given after a short period of time (a month maybe?). The bonus was significant enough to get people to at least defer a job search ($10K?), but SGI didn't manage to find a buyer. The check was to hit bank accounts on a particular day; the team waited to hear word that the literal money was in the bank -- and then all quit simultaneously. Is there at least some truthiness to it? Or has this just become Silicon Valley urban legend in my head?
    - davepeck 3y ago
      That rings a bell although fuzzily: as the new kid from school, I was pretty disconnected from the politics of the moment. I do seem to remember that the MineSet team departed en masse, but IIRC that departure roughly coincided with broader layoffs in the org. (With apologies for reviving 90s IRIX/Solaris snark in my earlier post. :-)

assimpleaspossi 3y ago

I was a system engineer for SGI in 1992 working mainly with McDonnell-Douglas in St Louis. It was thrilling to be sitting in the cafeteria and have Jim Clark plop down next to me for lunch. Just one of the guys. As an outsider--cause I didn't live and work in California--this was the go-go atmosphere of such companies back then where they thought they could do no wrong. And the after work parties were wild (how the heck do you break off half a toilet bowl?). One of the buildings had plastic over the windows cause that's where they were working on the plugin GL card for the PC. (Ssh! No one's supposed to know that!) Being the first system engineer in St Louis, my eyes lit up when my manager told me he had ordered an 16-core machine for my office--just for me! I was hired as a video expert. The company re-org'ed and my new boss decided he needed a Fortran expert so that was the end of my job with SGI.

ponhfgy 3y ago

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ponhfgy 3y ago

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johndhi 3y ago

When I was a kid I remember my brother and I asking my dad a ton of questions about SG. We viewed them as this amazing awesome company that made cool looking towers and the fastest computers in the world.

matthewmcg 3y ago

Much of this history is also described in Michael Lewis’s book the New New Thing (2000) which profiles Clark and his various ventures. It’s really a snapshot of pre-.com crash Silicon Valley.

CalChris 3y ago
My takeaway from that book was that Clark invented the dot com.

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mobilio 3y ago

This was explained here: https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-1/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-2/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-3/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-4/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-5/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/05/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-epilogue/ https://vizworld.com/2009/05/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-epi...

dekhn 3y ago

I was in love with SGI when I was an undergraduate just over the hill at UC Santa Cruz in the early to mid 90s. Everything about the machines from their industrial designed cases but wonderfully colorful cases, and the sexy desktop OS ("This is UNIX. I know this!") and the way IrisGL rendered molecular graphics. Driving to a Phish show at Shoreline, we passed the low-slung office buildings of SGI which seemed like the sexiest place to work. When I graduated, I thought I was "too dumb in CS" to get a job in Mountain View and went to grad school in biophysics instead. By the time I was a few years into grad school, I worked in a computer graphics lab outfitted with Reality Monsters and Octanes and other high end SGIs (when you maxxed out an SGI's graphics and RAM, they were really fast). I was porting molecular graphics code to Linux using Mesa (much to the derision of the SGI fans in the lab). When we got a FireGL2 card it had a linux driver and could do reasonable molecular graphics in real time and the SGI folks looked real scared (especially because the SGI Visual Workstation had just come out and was a very expensive turkey). Less than a decade after that I was working in those very buildings for Google. Google took over SGI's old HQ (Jeff Dean told me there was a period where Google and SGI overlapped in the GooglePlex and the SGI folks looked very sad as they paid for their lunches and teh googlers got free food). There was still plenty of SGI signage strewn about. And now Google has gone dumb and also built their own HQ next door (note the correlation between large SV companies building overly fancy HQs and then going out of business). Such is the cycle of sexy tech.

dalke 3y ago
We've talked before about our respective molecular graphics background. I started with Unix on a Personal IRIS as an undergrad working in a physics lab which used it for imaging capture and analysis. I was the nominal sys admin, with one semester of Minix under my belt and just enough to be dangerous. (I once removed /bin/cc because I thought it was possible to undelete, like on DOS. I had to ask around the meteorology department for a restore tape.) The summer before grad school I got a job at the local supercomputing center to work on a parallelization of CHARMm, using PVM. I developed it on that PI, and on a NeXT. That's also when I learned about people at my future grad school working on VR for molecular visualization, in a 1992 CACM article. So when I started looking for an advisor, that's the lab I chose, and I became the junior co-author and eventual lead developer of VMD. With a Crimson as my desktop machine, a lab full of SGIs and NeXTs, and the CAVE VR setup elsewhere in the building. Heady times. I visited SGI in 1995 or so, on holiday, thinking that would be a great place to work. They even had an Inventor plugin for molecular visualization, so I thought it would be a good lead. I emailed and got an invited to visit, where the host kindly told me that they were not going to do more in molecular visualization because they wanted to provide the hardware everyone uses, and not compete in that software space. In the early 1990s SGIs dominated molecular modeling (replacing Evans & Sutherland), so naturally the related tools, like molecular dynamics codes, also ran on them. But we started migrating to distributed computing, where it didn't make sense to have 16 expensive SGIs, leaving them more as the head .. which as you pointed out, was soon able to run just fine on a Linux machine.

latchkey 3y ago

Back in 1993, I was in college and working for the extended education department running their all their computer infrastructure. One day, someone wheeled this approx. 3x3 foot sized box to my door and asked me if I wanted it. It was a SGI Onyx with a giant monitor sitting on top, with a keyboard and mouse. I plugged it in and it sounded like an airplane taking off. It immediately heated up my entire tiny office. It was the 4th Unix I had ever played with (Ultrix, NeXT and A/UX were previous ones). It had some cool games on it, but beyond that, at the time, I had no use for it because A/UX on my Quadra950, was so much more fun to play with. I don't even think I ever opened it up to look at it. I don't know what I was thinking. lol. After realizing it did not have much going for it, I ended up just turning it on when the office was cold and using it as a foot rest. Oh yea, found a video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA

Firmwarrior 3y ago
Holy shit, that thing is amazing compared to the computers I had access to in the early 90s

nonrandomstring 3y ago

I agree that these machines and their OS were too proprietary and over-engineered to weather the PC revolution. But when I think back to my days using Suns and SG (Indigo) the memory feels like driving a Rolls Royce or Daimler with leather seats and walnut panels.

Uhhrrr 3y ago

The article doesn't mention the reason for the fall: less good but cheaper competitors. First Sun, then Windows NT and Linux.

cf100clunk 3y ago
> The article doesn't mention the reason for the fall: less good but cheaper competitors The article has this: ''As Bob Bishop took the reigns of SGI, things looked dark. AMD announced their 64 bit architecture in October, PC graphics had made massive strides while remaining significantly less expensive than SGI’s offerings, NT was proving to be a solid and less expensive competitor to UNIX, Linux was eating away at traditional UNIX market segments, and Itanium still hadn’t launched.'' I can agree with almost all of that statement but I object to the ''NT was proving to be a solid and less expensive competitor to UNIX'' part as mostly false in any mixed OS environment over which I'd ever been admin.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Well, do remember the cost of a UNIX license at the time (unless you were using BSD). If you didn’t have thousands of dollars on hand, NT was a good choice.
- Uhhrrr 3y ago
  But that's 1999, and they were already losing money in 1997, and the article doesn't say why. Sun was why.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
Look harder

browningstreet 3y ago

I had an Indigo2 on my desk in college. I moved back and forth between that an a NeXT cube that a colleague had in their lab. The NeXT was nice but SLOW. The Indigo2 wasn't especially fast but it was nice and could do visual things that just weren't available as readily on our alternatives. We had SunOS and Solaris systems that were mostly used for network and engineering projects, and I was engaged in some visualization work. When the O2 was announced I was quite sure it would be the solution to our speed issues.. around the same time, another colleague was the first to install a beta of Win95, and it did seem awfully pretty.

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ThinkBeat 3y ago

I remember when we got the first Indys at the uni. That was magic like. People nearly got into physical fights to use one of them. People came in at night to use them as well. I wonder if the uni is so locked down now that students can sit in the lab all night. Being a bit pragmatic in getting my actual thesis done I discovered that there was all of a sudden, a lot more resources available on one of the (older) Sun servers. It saved me days if not weeks.

vondur 3y ago

It's pretty simple why these Unix vendors all died. Linux and Intel chips. Sure you could get a really nice Sun system at the time with all of the redundancy tech built in, which cost around $50k. Or you can go and get 4 or 5 Linux servers from Dell running RedHat which by the early 2000's were faster too.

KineticLensman 3y ago

They had me at ‘Skywriter Reality Engine’. I’d used vaxen at Uni in the 80s, then got into industry using Symbolics Lisp machines, then had several dark years programming on DOS boxes. The return to a truly innovative workstation blew my mind

sneed_chucker 3y ago

I remember to thank SGI every time I format an XFS filesystem.

betaby 3y ago
Yes, XFS has been in the Linux kernel since 2001! Time flies.

martinpw 3y ago

Whenever this topic comes up there are always comments saying that SGI was taken by surprise by cheap hardware and if only they had seen it coming they could have prepared for it and managed it. I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma", which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.

szundi 3y ago
Thanks for this comment, very much appreciated.
ghaff 3y ago
Having worked longtime for a minicomputer company--which actually survived longer than most mostly because of some storage innovations along with some high-end Unix initiatives--it's really hard. You can't really kick a huge existing business to the curb. Or otherwise say we're going to largely start over. Kodak was not actually in a position to be big in digital. And, of course, the digital camera manufacturers mostly got eclipsed by smartphones anyway a decade or so later.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Data General?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yes. CLARiiON eventually enabled a sale to EMC (which arguably saved EMC for a time) and the Unix business (especially NUMA servers) were sufficient revenue producers for a while to keep the lights on. ThinLiiNe (or whatever the capitalization was) never went anywhere but neither did a lot of things in the dot.com era.
    - 3y ago

Keyframe 3y ago

Steve Jobs on Silicon Graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE

Apocryphon 3y ago

Low-key iconic machines, Hollywood kept putting them in movies. http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/index.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/index.html https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html#SGI https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html#SGI

pjmlp 3y ago

A bit of trivia, SGI used to host the C++ STL documentation based on HP libraries, pre-adoption into the standard.

timthorn 3y ago

I miss SGI for many reasons, but their industrial design (and that of pre-HPE Cray) is one of the big ones. The 19" rack form factor is the shipping container of the computing world - practical, standardised, sensible... and dull. The variety in enclosures matched the novelty in architectures of the period. Exciting times to be part of.

vrinsd 3y ago

I believe nVidia was started with a lot of SGI's core technology ; not "I have a good idea and I can't do it here" and more like "let me just take this stuff I doubt anyone will notice". I think SGI sued but didn't really pursue the matter because they didn't really see nVidia as a threat. I think Jensen was pivotal in this "technology transfer". Regarding computing cycles, boom/bust, I recently re-read Soul of New Machine and was struck by how much the world has NOT changed. Sure we're not talking about micro/mini-computers and writing micro-coded assembly but the whole "the market is pivoting and we need to ride this wave" and "work like a dog to meet some almost unobtainum goal" seems to still underpin being an engineer in "tech" today.

miohtama 3y ago
The Nvidia lawsuit is discussed in the article.
- _DeadFred_ 3y ago
  I mean there's more to it. NVidia literally just took SGI's IP. Only more blatant start was Cisco, where they straight stole a University computer.
  - meekaaku 3y ago
    where can i read about this cisco thing?
    - vrinsd 3y ago
      https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/ https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/
  - takinola 3y ago
    Cisco was started by a husband/wife team who were the heads of IT for the Stanford Electrical Engineering School and Business School respectively. Anecdotally, they first developed the technology trying to connect the networks for both schools.

sgt 3y ago

The article went very quick from rowdy teen throwing smoke bombs to... boom, he has a PhD in Computer Science. Really interesting article that goes into depth regarding the SGI products. I didn't know Clark basically invented the GPU. Speaking of exotic hardware, I'm actually sitting next to an SGI O2 (currently powered off). A beautiful machine!

cellularmitosis 3y ago

There's a kid on youtube (username 'dodoid') who put together a series of videos on SGI. Neat to see someone young get super enthusiastic about computing history.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I was at SGI and left with Clark to Netscape. That was a fun time in my career. That was also a time that it became clear SGI was about to explode as commodity GPUs were being developed by former SGI engineers and the core SGI graphics teams were attritting hard. Fun to read this story again and learn some of the things that happened later.

alecco 3y ago

Interesting insider comment from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30920824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30920824

jibbit 3y ago

i'll never forget my 1st time coming into a high end Flame suite. it was so exciting.. i don't think i could have been more excited if you'd told me i was stepping into the worlds first time machine

canucker2016 3y ago

There's the "SGI Irix bloat" internal email that got posted to Usenet. Took me awhile to find a copy on the net, https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.txt https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.t... Here's a formatted-for-HTML version: http://www.art.net/%7Ehopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html http://www.art.net/%7Ehopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarras...

icedchai 3y ago
Meanwhile, today, we have chat applications taking up almost a gig of memory...

cf100clunk 3y ago

I'd never met Rick Belluzzo, but having known SGI insiders of his era I gathered that he'd driven the company strongly towards NT on x86 at the cost/risk of losing their corporate and personal UNIX competencies, causing some internal outrage. When his time was up at SGI he quickly popped up at Microsoft running MSN in what I saw as a synecure meant as a pat on the back for a job well done. Am I right on this?

shrubble 3y ago
That is a widely held view among Unix nerds like me, at least.
- jra_samba 3y ago
  My recollection of that time (I was at SGI when Belluzzo was there). https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-fyi-this-is-my-recollection-activity-7153117822452158464-60MO?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-f...

Keyframe 3y ago

It still has that cachet with, well a bit older generation. I have an Indy and Indigo2 (purple - max impact one) and when someone visit and sees the machines it's like you sprawled a vintage ferrari in (our) eyes. I don't think there's anything comparable today when we have it all. I demonstrated IRIX to younger colleagues and it was - ok, so it's alright I guess, like anything else we have today? Yep.. but contemporary world was NOT like that. I had an Octane as well, heavy and loud beast. All in storage now waiting for move. In late 90s I worked a lot on SGI machines (vfx).

Arathorn 3y ago

There's a surprising amount of good info here about very first IRISes. I ended up with 3 of the very first IRIS 1400 workstations mentioned in the post which NASA Ames bought; at least one of which is still in working order. They were my first unix workstations (running a Unisoft-based sysv/bsd hybrid pre-IRIX variant), and is where I first learnt UNIX, C, IRIS GL, vi and lots of other good stuff. Irritatingly they shipped with an XNS rather than TCP/IP network stack (although I did get hold of a beta IP stack, I never got it work). I did get XNS working on a LAN using their EXOS 101 ethernet cards tho. In case anyone's interested, their graphics card (GE1, the world's first ever hardware 3D graphics card?) looks like: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/matrix.org/cRPawSGJrwDJeLIbGawWgPlz https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/m... ...and the PM2 68k processor card mentioned in the post looks like: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/matrix.org/jeaTvJJSnmdXsVhVwMOCzxsI https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/m... ...and one of the machines itself looks like: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/matrix.org/RSqYGIISgsYdPTqYznDnqsyD https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/v3/download/m... Suffice it to say that I have a very soft spot for these machines :)

danans 3y ago

> On the 10th of July in 2003, SGI vacated and leased their headquarters to Google. I was around to witness the he tail end of that office space transition (on the incoming side at Google). It was surreal to be sitting in the physical carcass of a company I had long fantasized about (in part due to their marketing via Hollywood). In retrospect it was ironic because a company that was based on selling very expensive high performance compute (SGI) was being physically replaced by a company selling (albeit indirectly) very cheap high performance compute.

paul_mark 3y ago

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ben7799 3y ago

I was kind of right the exact age to see all this happen all while I was in college. Fall 95 enter freshman year and we had Indys and IBM RS6000s as the main workstations on campus. Really great setup where you could sit at any workstation and all your stuff just worked and your whole environment seamlessly migrated. The only thing you had to do was if you were compiling your own stuff you'd have to recompile it for the machine you sat down at. SGI brought a demo truck to campus in the spring of my Freshman year (Spring 96) and blew us all away. They were there for interviews, obviously I was a freshman but we all went to check it out. Summer 96 I get an internship and for kicks they gave me an Indy with a 21" CRT (huge at the time) and the silly video camera that was like 10+ years ahead of it's time. Fall 96 we got labs full of O2s. Fall 1997 I bought a 3DFX card. MS/Intel somehow made a donation to the school and got them to start phasing out the Unix workstations. The windows NT setup was terrible, they never had the printing and seamless movement of files down till after I graduated. Video games in the Fall of 1997 on the 3DFX were basically as impressive as the demos on the $100k refrigerator sized machine SGI showed in 1995. Probably fall 1998 I remember my Dad got a computer with an Nvidia Riva 128. Spring 99 I graduated and that fall I rebuilt my PC with a Geforce 256. I'm not sure when I last saw an SGI, but I did briefly use one of their NT machines IIRC. Last time I had a Sun machine at work was probably 2004. I remember maybe 2007-2008 at work deciding for the first time we were going to support Linux, then by 2010-11 we had dropped support for Sun. Most of the commercial Unix workstations had tons of Unix annoyances I never found Linux to have. Irix was maybe the best. HP-UX was super annoying I remember. I didn't use DEC Unix and Tru64 much. Closed source PC Unix like SCO I remember being horrible.

fuzztester 3y ago

This reminds me of the book The Soul of a New Machine.

temporarely 3y ago

We had a few SGI boxes in arch school (for cad). I learned C++ on those boxes (the GL api, which I thought was beautiful btw). But the main attraction were the two demos (this is '91-2): the flight simulator was awesome and there was this deconstructing cube thing that was pretty wild as well. Compared to what was on PCs those days those SGI machines were truly dazzling.

rdtsc 3y ago

> announcing SGI’s intent to migrate to Itanium (and collaborating on projects Monterey and Trillian) while simultaneously launching an IA-32 series of machines running NT known as the Visual Workstation. That's pretty wild, I had completely forgotten about that. It was too late of course by then. I was working at a CAD/CAE the company which leased SGI workstations in the early 2000s. Was just a fresh grad wondering why were they leasing them, then realized they were more expensive than some cars. Some of the developers were starting to use NT workstation with 3D graphics, they were not cheap, but they could run circles around Octanes and Indigos at a fraction of the cost. They were rushing to port everything to NT as writing had been on the wall for a while by then.

junar 3y ago

I wish the author had shown their work regarding the mother's after-tax income. They apparently assume a 22% effective tax rate, but that seems unrealistically high. The SSA says that Social Security tax was a mere 1% before 1950, and would remain below 4% until the 1970s. [1] A 1949 Form 1040 [2] suggests that a single filer with 3 dependent children, earning $2700 that year, would have a federal income tax liability of only $7. Not 7 percent, 7 dollars. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/taxRates.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/taxRates.html [2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--1949.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--1949.pdf

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

>Nintendo 64 was an SGI workstation with ... 4MB of Rambus DRAM at 250 MHz (actually 4.5MB but 512K is visible only to the GPU) It was actually 9-bit RAM, but the CPU could only see 8 of the bits!

AlbertCory 3y ago

The ONLY companies that last more than a generation or two are family-owned. https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/whats-missing-with-american-ceos https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/whats-missing-with-ameri... There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, "professional management" just does not survive for very long.

mvkel 3y ago

"it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." If you're the incumbent, a paradigm shift usually forces you to intentionally cannibalize your existing revenue base in service of the not-yet-proven new thing. That's if you want to survive. It's incredibly difficult, rare, nearly impossible, to pull such a thing off within a company system. Imagine being Blockbuster, knowing that to survive, you'd need to transition to a content streaming company. That's a ton to unwind before you can even buy servers, let alone hire the people to -lead the industry- in such a shift. All to simply remain alive.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

I remember the nVidia CEO saying that nVidia is a software company. Whereas SGI thought of itself as a hardware company. That's why SGI is gone, and nVidia is still making the best graphics hardware.

fernly 3y ago

I appreciate the article. As a lowly member of technical staff 92-97 I didn't see or understand a fraction of this. I *loved* my Indy workstation and the IRIX desktop UI, and I admired the brilliance of some of the engineers I worked with. Remember the Lavarand[1]? Random number generator based on an array of lava lamps? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand

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TacticalCoder 3y ago

The 'G' in SGI is basically the same 'G' as in GPU. Had SGI still rocked the world, today they'd be at the forefront of AI. All the models would be trained on and run on SGI computers. The attack on SGI didn't only happen on the lame Windows side, with their crappy software and ultra lame 3D software (compared to what SGI had), which people would love because their lameness was matched by their ultra-cheap pricepoint. The attack on SGI also came from open-source and Linux: cheap commodity hardware that'd run both mediocre but ubiquitous commercial software and the very same cheap commodity hardware that'd run Linux. On which OS are most (all?) AI models trained today? What OS powers 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers? Linux. That's the tragedy of SGI: as if cheap commodity x86 hardware wasn't enough, they got then attacked by both Windows and Linux on that cheap hardware. P.S: as a sidenote my best friend (still best friend to this day)'s stepfather was the head of SGI Benelux (Belgium/The Netherlands/Luxembourg) so my friend had this SGI Indy (the "pizza tower" one) at his home. Guess what we'd do every day after school?

krylon 3y ago

One thing that set SGI apart from the rest was that their cases were so incredibly pretty. Even today, the most beautiful PC cases barely play in the same league (IMHO). When Apple started building those colorful cases around ~2000, they reached that level of aesthetic appeal, but then they went for brushed metal (which is also very pretty, but not that pretty, IMHO). Had one of the major PC vendors hired their designers and built just run-of-the-mill PCs, housing them in those amazing cases, I wonder how that would have worked out.

formerly_proven 3y ago
Interesting - some of them look neat, sure, but they also look fairly cheap. The O2 especially. The construction certainly isn't high quality, they're just stamped coil steel boxes with plastic wrapped around them. Some OEMs still do this, like this Alienware, which is just a squared-off miditower dressed up in a plastic shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1dlVPzUVo&t=8m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1dlVPzUVo&t=8m10s Of course in the 90s this would've been quite modern I imagine, considering that the competition was gray painted steel boxes and steel cabinets with a gray powder coat.

pixelpoet 3y ago

Random trivia which will likely get buried but whatever: the rendering software Octane Render got its name from my refusing to let the author use my rendering software's name, and he had some historical beef with us, the two devs of Indigo Renderer, so he named his renderer after the SGI machine that came after the Indigo, Octane. He also leant his SGI Indigo2 to the LGR guy on YouTube, and he did a great video on it: https://youtu.be/ZDxLa6P6exc https://youtu.be/ZDxLa6P6exc

selimthegrim 3y ago

The article is a little imprecise, though. Clark enrolled in the night school at Tulane, which is what is now called the School of Professional Advancement, not the regular school.

masfoobar 3y ago

I was about 10 years old when films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park came out. Although I had games consoles I never had a proper computer. I had friends who owned an Amiga or Amstrad but they always wanted to come to mine and play Sega or Nintendo. Being into art at the time, was facinated with Silicon Graphics computers. If I could "wish" a xmas present, it would have been (something like) an SGI Indigo2 system. It wasn't long before a 486-PC entered our home. It was certainly a learning experience trying to get Windows 3.1 to work but it was DooM that completely changed my views on video games. I never expected graphics to make such a huge leap when I considered Mortal Kombat 2 to be peak graphics! How game graphics changed for the rest of the 90s is insane!!! When the Nintendo 64 came about (originally Ultra 64 and Project Reality) I honestly had a childish attitude that NOTHING would touch it for a long time because it was SGI under the hood! In defence of my childish attitude, I was still a child. The harsh reality is... by the time the Nintendo 64 was on the shelves I knew it was already "old tech" after watching (and playing) a demo of Tomb Raider 2 in a computer shop. It was likely a Pentium 90 mhz computer with Windows 95, maybe 500GB Hard drive space and running on VooDoo graphics. Once you get over the awesome graphics you realise that these machines can be anywhere from £600-£1500. My defensive side kicks in... but.. but.. SGI is still better, right? They cost so much more they are not about games, they are for Hollywood movies! A year or two after, seeing what 3D animation software can do... wouldn't be surprised if rendering speed was competitive on Windows 98 machines to SGI ones. Move on to today. Our phones are more powerful than those really expensive SGI systems from 1992. It is crazy when you think about it.

thewileyone 3y ago

Wow, this article brought back memories I'd forgotten. I applied for an internship at Wavefront Technologies in Santa Barbara back in the 90's. I was so impressed with their offices and the SGI boxes they were using.