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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 an

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.
- tombert 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm more annoyed about Amiga than SGI. They were priced competitively with Apple and IBM offerings. I guess it's just kind of impossible to predict the future. I don't think it's an incompetent decision to try and focus entirely on the workstation world; there are lots of businesses that make no attempt to market to consumers, and only market to large companies/organizations, since the way budgeting works with big companies is sort of categorically different than consumer budgets. But you're absolutely right. Apple and Windows computers just kept getting better and better, faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, as did 3D modeling and video editing software for them. I mean, hell, as a 12 year old kid in 2003, I had both Lightwave 3D (student license) and Screenblast Movie Studio (now Vegas) running on my cheap, low-spec desktop computer, and it was running fast enough to be useful (at least for standard definition).
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Of course, the reason they got better so fast is volume. There was just way more investment into those platforms. Which means this explanation is somewhat circular: they were successful because they were successful. I think a more useful explanation is that people rate the value of avoiding vendor lockin extraordinarily high, to the extent that people will happily pick worse technology if there's at least two competing vendors to choose from. The IBM PCs were not good, but for convoluted legal reasons related to screwups by IBM their tech became a competitive ecosystem. Bad for IBM, good for everyone else. Their competitors did not make that "mistake" and so became less preferred. Microsoft won for a while despite being single vendor because the alternative was UNIX, which was at least sorta multi-vendor at the OS level, except that portability between UNIXen was ropey at best in the 90s and of course you traded software lockin for hardware lockin; not really an improvement. Combined with the much more expensive hardware, lack of gaming and terrible UI toolkits (of which Microsoft was the undisputed master in the 90s) and then later Linux, and that was goodbye to them. Of course after a decade of the Windows monopoly everyone was looking for a way out and settled on abusing an interactive document format, as it was the nearest thing lying around that was a non-Microsoft specific way to display UI. And browsers were also a competitive ecosystem so a double win. HTML based UIs totally sucked for the end users, but .... multi-vendor is worth more than nice UI, so, it wins. See also how Android wiped out every other mobile OS except iOS (nobody cares much about lockin for mobile apps, the value of them is just not high enough).
hnhg 3y ago
The people that created the Amiga weren't the same people as the ones leading Commodore. Apple's success seems to have been heavily based on the company's leader being very involved in product development and passionate about it. Along the same lines, there is an alternate timeline where the Sharp X68000 took over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OepeiBF5Jnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OepeiBF5Jnk
- tombert 3y ago
  I've actually seen that video! Yeah, I think that would also have been a better timeline; I'm just stuck in the anglo-world and thus my knowledge is mostly limited to what was released in the US or Europe.
- randomdata 3y ago
  I'm not sure Apple did continue to succeed after its early success. It eventually gave up its name to NeXT, which is who found later success.
  - samatman 3y ago
    The standard quip here is that NeXT purchased Apple for negative $400 million.
ip26 3y ago
We've seen again and again that the high end of the computer market can't sustain itself; the mass market outruns it. The result is that the high end works best when leveraging the mass market instead of trying to compete with it. See the dominance of Threadripper in workstations, which is built on top of mainstream desktop and server parts bin. Or look at the Epyc based supercomputers, rumored to be the only supercomputers to turn a net profit for the suppliers, thanks to leveraging a lot of existing IP.
prpl 3y ago
It’s just a lesson in worse is (often) better. If you can do some most of the job with something that is either cheaper, easier to build, or easier to iterate on, then it will often overtake a better engineered solution.
qqtt 3y ago
My main problem with Silicon Graphics (& have the same problem with Sun Microsystems) is that they just tried to do too much in propriety hardware and completely resisted standards. Microsoft & IBM "won" because they made computers with actual upgrade paths and operating systems with wide support among upgrade paths. With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing. In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems. One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.
- thisislife2 3y ago
  > With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing. How is that in anyway different from Apple today with it's ARM SoCs, soldered SSDs and an OS that requires "entitlements" from Apple to "unlock" features and develop on?
  - mcculley 3y ago
    Are there entitlements or unlockable features other than when talking about App Store distribution?
  - Gracana 3y ago
    You can buy a cheap Mac and easily write programs for it. You don't have to spend $40k on a computer, you don't have to buy a support contract, you don't have to buy developer tools.
    - fuzztester 3y ago
JohnBooty 3y ago
If Amiga really "deserved" to win, I think they wouldn't have been eclipsed by the PC ecosystem in terms of performance. They leapt out ahead of the competition with an advanced OS, purpose-built for graphics and sound in a way that PCs and Macs weren't. Which was great. But they weren't really better than the competition. They were just doing something the competition wasn't. And when the competition actually started doing those things they got eclipsed in a hurry. I wonder if Tesla will suffer the same fate. They were obviously around a decade ahead of the established players when it came to electric cars. But once the other established players actually got serious about electric cars, Tesla largely stopped being special, and upstarts like Lucid and Rivian are neck and neck with them (in terms of compelling products, not sales) as well.
- cduzz 3y ago
  "the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed." This means there are products out there with futuristic features that will be seen as requirements for all things going forward and right now those features are niche elements of some product. The Amiga was a fantastic device but not a general purpose device. Lots of things are fantastic at a niche but not general, and those almost always fail. Is this also the "worse is better" truism?
- hinkley 3y ago
  Tesla will also suffer a reverse cult of personality problem. I don’t know anyone at Rivian so my opinion of them is neutral. Meanwhile Tesla is run by the jackass who ruined twitter.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    There are definitely a lot of people who would consider Musk's personality a huge minus. I'm one of them. I'm less clear on whether or not he's a net minus. I don't know if his detractors outnumber his fans or vice-versa.
bluedino 3y ago
They were destined for eventually dying like the rest of the high end UNIX workstation market. Linux and x86 got better and better every year.
- tombert 3y ago
  Yeah, and OS X more or less mainstream-ized consumer UNIX as well. It gave you access to the UNIX tools in the command line if you wanted them, had a solid UNIX core, but was a lot cheaper than an SGI and also easy to use.
epcoa 3y ago
> the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time At the time. A brief moment in time, and then they had no path forward and were rapidly steamrolled. Nothing was "chosen wrong" in this aspect.
- tombert 3y ago
  Well, wait, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking way before Apple or Windows got it, like the mid 80s. I don't think Windows got it until Windows NT, and it didn't become mainstream until Windows 95. Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking that would freeze if you just thought it about it funny [1] all the way until OS X. There's other stuff too; they had better color graphics in the 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware. Even by 1990, the video toaster was released, well before it got any port to DOS. [1] I'm sure it got better, my first exposure to it was System 7 and that thing was an unholy mess. I didn't touch macOS again until OS X.
  - epcoa 3y ago
    Long before Windows 95 there was DOOM and DOOM would not run on an Amiga. > 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware. And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting? > Even by 1990, the video toaster was released, And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform. Also, I don't buy into the idea that just because a company had something "superior" for a short period of time with no further company direction that they didn't lose fair and square. That Amiga had something cool in the 80s but didn't or couldn't evolve isn't because the market "chose wrong". Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run. Suffering a few more years with the occasional bomb on System 7 was not a market failure. > Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking What was bizarre about it, compared to any other cooperative multitasking system of the time? Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.
snakeyjake 3y ago
>One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time Amiga was only better 1985-1988. I still have my original Amiga and A2000. I was an Amiga user for a decade. They were very good. I was platform agnostic, caring only to get work done as quickly and easily as possible so I was also an early Macintosh user as well as Sun and PA-RISC. And yes, I still have all of those dinosaurs too. By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back. But by 1988 the PS/2 with a 386 and VGA was out and the A2000 was shipping with a 7MHz 68000 and ECS. By 1990 the 486s were on the market and Macs were shipping with faster 030s and could be equipped with NuBUS graphics cards that made Amiga graphics modes look like decelerated CGA. After the A2000 the writing was on the wall. Note: my perspective is of someone who has always used computers to do work, with ALMOST no care for video games so all of the blitter magic of Amiga was irrelevant to me. That being said when DOOM came out I bought a PC and rarely used my Amigas again. What I can confidently assert is that I upgraded my A2000 many times and ran into the absolute configuration nightmare that is the Amiga architecture and the problems with grafting upgrades onto a complex system with multiple tiers of RAM and close OS integration with custom chips. One more bit of heresy is that I always considered Sun's platform to be superior to SGI's.
- logicprog 3y ago
  > Amiga was only better 1985-1988. By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back. Oh indubitably! I don't think even the most committed Amiga fan, even the ones that speculate about alternate histories, would deny that at all. The thing is, though, that only happened because Commodore essentially decided that since it had so much of a head start, it could just rest on its laurels and not really innovate or improve anything substantially, instead of constantly pushing forward like all of its competitors would do, and so eventually the linear or even exponential curve of other hardware manufacturers' improvements outpaced its essentially flat improvement curve. So it doesn't seem like IBM PCs and eventually even Macs outpacing the power of Amiga Hardware was inevitable or inherent from the start. If they had instead continued to push their lead — actually stuck with the advanced Amiga chips that they were working on before it was canceled and replaced with ECS for instance — I certainly see the possibility of them keeping up with other hardware, and eventually transitioning to 3D acceleration chips instead of 2D acceleration chips when that happened in the console world, eventually perhaps even leading to the Amiga line being the first workstation line to have the gpus, and further cementing their lead, while maintaining everything that made Amiga great. Speculating even further, as we are seeing currently with the Apple M-series having a computer architecture that is composed of a ton of custom made special purpose chips is actually an extremely effective way of doing things; what if Amiga still existed in this day and age and had a head start in that direction, a platform with a history of being extremely open and well documented and extensible being the first to do this kind of architecture, instead of it being Apple? Of course there may have been fundamental technical flaws with the Amiga approach that made it unable to keep up with other hardware even if Commodore had had the will; I have seen some decent arguments to that effect, namely that since it was using custom vendor-specific hardware instead of commodity hardware that was used by everyone, they couldn't take advantage of the cross-vendor compatibility like IBM PCs, could and also couldn't take advantage of economies of scale like Intel could, but who knows!
mtillman 3y ago
The Amiga couldn't handle the performance requirements of Doom at the time (Game Engine Black Book Doom). Workbench was more fun than Windows and at least the install process that was early linux. As much as I loved my O2 (my first professional computer), it was underpowered for the time for anything other than texture manipulation. The closed source nature of that time period and the hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers on top of already very expensive hardware. The Cray-linked Origin 200's ran Netscape web server with ease but that's a lot of hardware in a time period when everything went out of date very quickly-donated ours! Irix still looks better than the new Mac OS UIs IMO but no-Motif is a small price to pay for far cheaper access to SDKs IMO. Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature. https://insecure.org/sploits_irix.html https://insecure.org/sploits_irix.html
- downut 3y ago
  "... hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers..." For Fortran? My memory is hazy but at NASA NAS a bunch of us were using gcc/g++ starting ~1990. g++ was... an adventure. Building my own (fine!) compiler for free(!) got me hooked on OSS to the point that when Linux/FreeBSD launched I jumped in as fast as I could. I really loved my various SGI boxen. Magical times. I was a NASA "manager" so had the Macintosh "manager" interface box that I solved by keeping it turned off.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- axpvms 3y ago
  >Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature. That was in addition to having three default accounts with well known passwords and a telnet server.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Some versions of IRIX (4.x, maybe?) also defaulted to having X11 authentication disabled. Anyone in the office could "xmelt" your screen... or worse.
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
The reason SGI failed, and eventually Sun too, isn't because the world "chose wrong", but because their performance simply did not keep up with x86. When these RISC-based workstations were initially released their performance, especially at graphics, was well beyond what a PC could do, and justified their high prices. A "workstation" was in a class by itself, and helped establish the RISC mystique. However, eventually Intel caught up with the performance, at a lower price, and that was pretty much the end. Sun lived on for a while based on their OS and software ecosystem, but eventually that was not enough especially with the advent of Linux, GCC, etc, as a free alternative.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Sun really struggled to make full use of their multicore systems. That m:n process model is coming back with fibers and libuv, but we have programming primitives and a deeper roster of experienced devs now than we did then. Back then they caused problems with scalability. There were times when Java ran better on Intel than on Solaris.
- cduzz 3y ago
  Ivan Sutherland described the reason [1] why PCs won a long time ago. Basically a custom tool may do a thing "better" than a general purpose tool for a while, but eventually, because more resources are spent improving the general tool, the generalized tool will be able to do the same thing as the specialty tool, but more flexibly and economically. [1] http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html
- sys_64738 3y ago
  Sun had the perfect opportunity with Utility Computing around the mid-2000s but when cloud took off we had Oracle buying SUNW. They killed Sun Cloud which had the opportunity to be big, vast, and powered by JAVA hardware. Sun Microsystems was a company like no other. The last of a dying breed of "family" technology companies.
  - msisk6 3y ago
    I was at the MySQL conference when it was announced that Oracle was buying Sun. It just took all the life out of the conference. All the Sun folks were super pissed off. Truly the end of an era.
jandrese 3y ago
SGI dug their own grave. Not only were the workstations expensive, but they demanded outrageously priced support contracts. This behavior drives people nuts and will insure that the switch to a competitor the instant it becomes an option. Despite the high cost, the support contracts had a pretty lousy reputation as well, with long wait times for repairs from a handful of overworked techs. Even worse is the company turned away from its core competencies to focus on being an also-ran in the PC workstation market. There was a window in the mid-90s where it would have been possible for SGI to develop a PC 3D accelerator for the consumer market using their GE technology, but nobody in the C-Suite had the stomach to make a new product that would undercut the enormous profit margins on their core product. It's the classic corporate trap. Missing out on the next big thing because you can't see past next quarter's numbers. Imagine basically an N64 on a PCI card for $150 in 1996. The launch versions could be bundled with a fully accelerated version of Quake. The market would have exploded.
- grumpyprole 3y ago
  > The market would have exploded Absolutely, they could have been where Nvidia is now!
  - christkv 3y ago
    Or they could have 3dfxed themselves.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    I'd argue Nvidia is ex-SGI, and so is ex-ATI. It's all their crew in the beginnings.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      I wish we could have a debugging view of the universe, draw a diagram with clusters of people labeled with company names, and watch them change over time. :-)
      - 3y ago
knorker 3y ago
Well, for SGI that's like saying the world "chose wrong" that long distance travel is not done by Saturn 5 rockets. The Saturn 5 was clearly a technical marvel better than any plane, and it'd get you anywhere much faster. If you spare no expense, you get a better product. Sure. I'm also not surprised that a $100k BMW is more comfortable than a Renault Clio.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yes, Irix is one of the few UNIX based OSes that I actually find cool.
- hinkley 3y ago
  It certainly got fewer complaints than HP-UX.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    On HP-UX 10, back in 2000, the C compiler version I was using still wasn't fully ANSI C, and needed K&R C function declarations, but hey at least we had containers (HP Vault), and 64 bit file system access.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    What were the complaints that HP-UX used to get? I used it for a while earlier at work, and don't remember many problems with it. One did have to apply OS patches fairly regularly to it, but IIRC, that process was somewhat smooth.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      In the time of SGI, I believe it had a lot of posix compliance problems. And if memory serves, the Bible (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603263.Advanced_Programming_in_the_UNIX_Environment https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603263.Advanced_Programm...) didn’t cover it, which was a problem.
      - fuzztester 3y ago
        Okay, got it. :)
- sys_64738 3y ago
  People are always passionate about various UNIX systems and their derivatives like Linux. Windows is so utilitarian.
cladopa 3y ago
I never had an Amiga, but I had friends that had it. It was a superior tech only for a very small period of time. What happened was Intel, they took great decisions like automating the design of their processors and this made them grow at an incredible pace. The Amiga depended on a different processor that stagnated.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  The 68k CPU lineup at the heart of the Amiga was competitive well into the 90's; the Amiga had run out of juice by 1989. The Amiga was only as good as the custom chips. If Commodore kept investing in R&D for the custom chips, they would have at least remained competitive.
- sys_64738 3y ago
  Intel never pulled ahead until the Pentium but by then Motorola weren't interested in the 68K series.
cameldrv 3y ago
I used some SGIs in the mid-late nineties, and they did have cool 3D graphics capabilities. I found 4dwm to be kind of cool but mostly gimmicky and it was really slow on the Indy and O2. Windows 95/NT were much snappier on contemporary hardware. By '97 or so SGI actually had essentially given up competing when they shut down the team that was developing the successor to InfiniteReality. In a sense though, Silicon Graphics did become more standard, in that their original 3D framework was Iris GL, which then evolved into OpenGL, which became the main 3D graphics standard for many years.

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.

tombert 3y ago
Yeah, I'm more annoyed about Amiga than SGI. They were priced competitively with Apple and IBM offerings. I guess it's just kind of impossible to predict the future. I don't think it's an incompetent decision to try and focus entirely on the workstation world; there are lots of businesses that make no attempt to market to consumers, and only market to large companies/organizations, since the way budgeting works with big companies is sort of categorically different than consumer budgets. But you're absolutely right. Apple and Windows computers just kept getting better and better, faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, as did 3D modeling and video editing software for them. I mean, hell, as a 12 year old kid in 2003, I had both Lightwave 3D (student license) and Screenblast Movie Studio (now Vegas) running on my cheap, low-spec desktop computer, and it was running fast enough to be useful (at least for standard definition).
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Of course, the reason they got better so fast is volume. There was just way more investment into those platforms. Which means this explanation is somewhat circular: they were successful because they were successful. I think a more useful explanation is that people rate the value of avoiding vendor lockin extraordinarily high, to the extent that people will happily pick worse technology if there's at least two competing vendors to choose from. The IBM PCs were not good, but for convoluted legal reasons related to screwups by IBM their tech became a competitive ecosystem. Bad for IBM, good for everyone else. Their competitors did not make that "mistake" and so became less preferred. Microsoft won for a while despite being single vendor because the alternative was UNIX, which was at least sorta multi-vendor at the OS level, except that portability between UNIXen was ropey at best in the 90s and of course you traded software lockin for hardware lockin; not really an improvement. Combined with the much more expensive hardware, lack of gaming and terrible UI toolkits (of which Microsoft was the undisputed master in the 90s) and then later Linux, and that was goodbye to them. Of course after a decade of the Windows monopoly everyone was looking for a way out and settled on abusing an interactive document format, as it was the nearest thing lying around that was a non-Microsoft specific way to display UI. And browsers were also a competitive ecosystem so a double win. HTML based UIs totally sucked for the end users, but .... multi-vendor is worth more than nice UI, so, it wins. See also how Android wiped out every other mobile OS except iOS (nobody cares much about lockin for mobile apps, the value of them is just not high enough).

hnhg 3y ago

The people that created the Amiga weren't the same people as the ones leading Commodore. Apple's success seems to have been heavily based on the company's leader being very involved in product development and passionate about it. Along the same lines, there is an alternate timeline where the Sharp X68000 took over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OepeiBF5Jnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OepeiBF5Jnk

tombert 3y ago
I've actually seen that video! Yeah, I think that would also have been a better timeline; I'm just stuck in the anglo-world and thus my knowledge is mostly limited to what was released in the US or Europe.
randomdata 3y ago
I'm not sure Apple did continue to succeed after its early success. It eventually gave up its name to NeXT, which is who found later success.
- samatman 3y ago
  The standard quip here is that NeXT purchased Apple for negative $400 million.

ip26 3y ago

We've seen again and again that the high end of the computer market can't sustain itself; the mass market outruns it. The result is that the high end works best when leveraging the mass market instead of trying to compete with it. See the dominance of Threadripper in workstations, which is built on top of mainstream desktop and server parts bin. Or look at the Epyc based supercomputers, rumored to be the only supercomputers to turn a net profit for the suppliers, thanks to leveraging a lot of existing IP.

prpl 3y ago

It’s just a lesson in worse is (often) better. If you can do some most of the job with something that is either cheaper, easier to build, or easier to iterate on, then it will often overtake a better engineered solution.

qqtt 3y ago

My main problem with Silicon Graphics (& have the same problem with Sun Microsystems) is that they just tried to do too much in propriety hardware and completely resisted standards. Microsoft & IBM "won" because they made computers with actual upgrade paths and operating systems with wide support among upgrade paths. With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing. In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems. One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.

thisislife2 3y ago
> With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing. How is that in anyway different from Apple today with it's ARM SoCs, soldered SSDs and an OS that requires "entitlements" from Apple to "unlock" features and develop on?
- mcculley 3y ago
  Are there entitlements or unlockable features other than when talking about App Store distribution?
- Gracana 3y ago
  You can buy a cheap Mac and easily write programs for it. You don't have to spend $40k on a computer, you don't have to buy a support contract, you don't have to buy developer tools.
  - fuzztester 3y ago

JohnBooty 3y ago

If Amiga really "deserved" to win, I think they wouldn't have been eclipsed by the PC ecosystem in terms of performance. They leapt out ahead of the competition with an advanced OS, purpose-built for graphics and sound in a way that PCs and Macs weren't. Which was great. But they weren't really better than the competition. They were just doing something the competition wasn't. And when the competition actually started doing those things they got eclipsed in a hurry. I wonder if Tesla will suffer the same fate. They were obviously around a decade ahead of the established players when it came to electric cars. But once the other established players actually got serious about electric cars, Tesla largely stopped being special, and upstarts like Lucid and Rivian are neck and neck with them (in terms of compelling products, not sales) as well.

cduzz 3y ago
"the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed." This means there are products out there with futuristic features that will be seen as requirements for all things going forward and right now those features are niche elements of some product. The Amiga was a fantastic device but not a general purpose device. Lots of things are fantastic at a niche but not general, and those almost always fail. Is this also the "worse is better" truism?
hinkley 3y ago
Tesla will also suffer a reverse cult of personality problem. I don’t know anyone at Rivian so my opinion of them is neutral. Meanwhile Tesla is run by the jackass who ruined twitter.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  There are definitely a lot of people who would consider Musk's personality a huge minus. I'm one of them. I'm less clear on whether or not he's a net minus. I don't know if his detractors outnumber his fans or vice-versa.

bluedino 3y ago

They were destined for eventually dying like the rest of the high end UNIX workstation market. Linux and x86 got better and better every year.

tombert 3y ago
Yeah, and OS X more or less mainstream-ized consumer UNIX as well. It gave you access to the UNIX tools in the command line if you wanted them, had a solid UNIX core, but was a lot cheaper than an SGI and also easy to use.

epcoa 3y ago

> the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time At the time. A brief moment in time, and then they had no path forward and were rapidly steamrolled. Nothing was "chosen wrong" in this aspect.

tombert 3y ago
Well, wait, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking way before Apple or Windows got it, like the mid 80s. I don't think Windows got it until Windows NT, and it didn't become mainstream until Windows 95. Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking that would freeze if you just thought it about it funny [1] all the way until OS X. There's other stuff too; they had better color graphics in the 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware. Even by 1990, the video toaster was released, well before it got any port to DOS. [1] I'm sure it got better, my first exposure to it was System 7 and that thing was an unholy mess. I didn't touch macOS again until OS X.
- epcoa 3y ago
  Long before Windows 95 there was DOOM and DOOM would not run on an Amiga. > 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware. And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting? > Even by 1990, the video toaster was released, And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform. Also, I don't buy into the idea that just because a company had something "superior" for a short period of time with no further company direction that they didn't lose fair and square. That Amiga had something cool in the 80s but didn't or couldn't evolve isn't because the market "chose wrong". Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run. Suffering a few more years with the occasional bomb on System 7 was not a market failure. > Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking What was bizarre about it, compared to any other cooperative multitasking system of the time? Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.

snakeyjake 3y ago

>One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time Amiga was only better 1985-1988. I still have my original Amiga and A2000. I was an Amiga user for a decade. They were very good. I was platform agnostic, caring only to get work done as quickly and easily as possible so I was also an early Macintosh user as well as Sun and PA-RISC. And yes, I still have all of those dinosaurs too. By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back. But by 1988 the PS/2 with a 386 and VGA was out and the A2000 was shipping with a 7MHz 68000 and ECS. By 1990 the 486s were on the market and Macs were shipping with faster 030s and could be equipped with NuBUS graphics cards that made Amiga graphics modes look like decelerated CGA. After the A2000 the writing was on the wall. Note: my perspective is of someone who has always used computers to do work, with ALMOST no care for video games so all of the blitter magic of Amiga was irrelevant to me. That being said when DOOM came out I bought a PC and rarely used my Amigas again. What I can confidently assert is that I upgraded my A2000 many times and ran into the absolute configuration nightmare that is the Amiga architecture and the problems with grafting upgrades onto a complex system with multiple tiers of RAM and close OS integration with custom chips. One more bit of heresy is that I always considered Sun's platform to be superior to SGI's.

logicprog 3y ago
> Amiga was only better 1985-1988. By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back. Oh indubitably! I don't think even the most committed Amiga fan, even the ones that speculate about alternate histories, would deny that at all. The thing is, though, that only happened because Commodore essentially decided that since it had so much of a head start, it could just rest on its laurels and not really innovate or improve anything substantially, instead of constantly pushing forward like all of its competitors would do, and so eventually the linear or even exponential curve of other hardware manufacturers' improvements outpaced its essentially flat improvement curve. So it doesn't seem like IBM PCs and eventually even Macs outpacing the power of Amiga Hardware was inevitable or inherent from the start. If they had instead continued to push their lead — actually stuck with the advanced Amiga chips that they were working on before it was canceled and replaced with ECS for instance — I certainly see the possibility of them keeping up with other hardware, and eventually transitioning to 3D acceleration chips instead of 2D acceleration chips when that happened in the console world, eventually perhaps even leading to the Amiga line being the first workstation line to have the gpus, and further cementing their lead, while maintaining everything that made Amiga great. Speculating even further, as we are seeing currently with the Apple M-series having a computer architecture that is composed of a ton of custom made special purpose chips is actually an extremely effective way of doing things; what if Amiga still existed in this day and age and had a head start in that direction, a platform with a history of being extremely open and well documented and extensible being the first to do this kind of architecture, instead of it being Apple? Of course there may have been fundamental technical flaws with the Amiga approach that made it unable to keep up with other hardware even if Commodore had had the will; I have seen some decent arguments to that effect, namely that since it was using custom vendor-specific hardware instead of commodity hardware that was used by everyone, they couldn't take advantage of the cross-vendor compatibility like IBM PCs, could and also couldn't take advantage of economies of scale like Intel could, but who knows!

mtillman 3y ago

The Amiga couldn't handle the performance requirements of Doom at the time (Game Engine Black Book Doom). Workbench was more fun than Windows and at least the install process that was early linux. As much as I loved my O2 (my first professional computer), it was underpowered for the time for anything other than texture manipulation. The closed source nature of that time period and the hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers on top of already very expensive hardware. The Cray-linked Origin 200's ran Netscape web server with ease but that's a lot of hardware in a time period when everything went out of date very quickly-donated ours! Irix still looks better than the new Mac OS UIs IMO but no-Motif is a small price to pay for far cheaper access to SDKs IMO. Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature. https://insecure.org/sploits_irix.html https://insecure.org/sploits_irix.html

downut 3y ago
"... hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers..." For Fortran? My memory is hazy but at NASA NAS a bunch of us were using gcc/g++ starting ~1990. g++ was... an adventure. Building my own (fine!) compiler for free(!) got me hooked on OSS to the point that when Linux/FreeBSD launched I jumped in as fast as I could. I really loved my various SGI boxen. Magical times. I was a NASA "manager" so had the Macintosh "manager" interface box that I solved by keeping it turned off.
deleted 3y ago
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axpvms 3y ago
>Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature. That was in addition to having three default accounts with well known passwords and a telnet server.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Some versions of IRIX (4.x, maybe?) also defaulted to having X11 authentication disabled. Anyone in the office could "xmelt" your screen... or worse.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

The reason SGI failed, and eventually Sun too, isn't because the world "chose wrong", but because their performance simply did not keep up with x86. When these RISC-based workstations were initially released their performance, especially at graphics, was well beyond what a PC could do, and justified their high prices. A "workstation" was in a class by itself, and helped establish the RISC mystique. However, eventually Intel caught up with the performance, at a lower price, and that was pretty much the end. Sun lived on for a while based on their OS and software ecosystem, but eventually that was not enough especially with the advent of Linux, GCC, etc, as a free alternative.

hinkley 3y ago
Sun really struggled to make full use of their multicore systems. That m:n process model is coming back with fibers and libuv, but we have programming primitives and a deeper roster of experienced devs now than we did then. Back then they caused problems with scalability. There were times when Java ran better on Intel than on Solaris.
cduzz 3y ago
Ivan Sutherland described the reason [1] why PCs won a long time ago. Basically a custom tool may do a thing "better" than a general purpose tool for a while, but eventually, because more resources are spent improving the general tool, the generalized tool will be able to do the same thing as the specialty tool, but more flexibly and economically. [1] http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html
sys_64738 3y ago
Sun had the perfect opportunity with Utility Computing around the mid-2000s but when cloud took off we had Oracle buying SUNW. They killed Sun Cloud which had the opportunity to be big, vast, and powered by JAVA hardware. Sun Microsystems was a company like no other. The last of a dying breed of "family" technology companies.
- msisk6 3y ago
  I was at the MySQL conference when it was announced that Oracle was buying Sun. It just took all the life out of the conference. All the Sun folks were super pissed off. Truly the end of an era.

jandrese 3y ago

SGI dug their own grave. Not only were the workstations expensive, but they demanded outrageously priced support contracts. This behavior drives people nuts and will insure that the switch to a competitor the instant it becomes an option. Despite the high cost, the support contracts had a pretty lousy reputation as well, with long wait times for repairs from a handful of overworked techs. Even worse is the company turned away from its core competencies to focus on being an also-ran in the PC workstation market. There was a window in the mid-90s where it would have been possible for SGI to develop a PC 3D accelerator for the consumer market using their GE technology, but nobody in the C-Suite had the stomach to make a new product that would undercut the enormous profit margins on their core product. It's the classic corporate trap. Missing out on the next big thing because you can't see past next quarter's numbers. Imagine basically an N64 on a PCI card for $150 in 1996. The launch versions could be bundled with a fully accelerated version of Quake. The market would have exploded.

grumpyprole 3y ago
> The market would have exploded Absolutely, they could have been where Nvidia is now!
- christkv 3y ago
  Or they could have 3dfxed themselves.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  I'd argue Nvidia is ex-SGI, and so is ex-ATI. It's all their crew in the beginnings.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    I wish we could have a debugging view of the universe, draw a diagram with clusters of people labeled with company names, and watch them change over time. :-)
    - 3y ago

knorker 3y ago

Well, for SGI that's like saying the world "chose wrong" that long distance travel is not done by Saturn 5 rockets. The Saturn 5 was clearly a technical marvel better than any plane, and it'd get you anywhere much faster. If you spare no expense, you get a better product. Sure. I'm also not surprised that a $100k BMW is more comfortable than a Renault Clio.

pjmlp 3y ago

Yes, Irix is one of the few UNIX based OSes that I actually find cool.

hinkley 3y ago
It certainly got fewer complaints than HP-UX.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  On HP-UX 10, back in 2000, the C compiler version I was using still wasn't fully ANSI C, and needed K&R C function declarations, but hey at least we had containers (HP Vault), and 64 bit file system access.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  What were the complaints that HP-UX used to get? I used it for a while earlier at work, and don't remember many problems with it. One did have to apply OS patches fairly regularly to it, but IIRC, that process was somewhat smooth.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    In the time of SGI, I believe it had a lot of posix compliance problems. And if memory serves, the Bible (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603263.Advanced_Programming_in_the_UNIX_Environment https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603263.Advanced_Programm...) didn’t cover it, which was a problem.
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      Okay, got it. :)
sys_64738 3y ago
People are always passionate about various UNIX systems and their derivatives like Linux. Windows is so utilitarian.

cladopa 3y ago

I never had an Amiga, but I had friends that had it. It was a superior tech only for a very small period of time. What happened was Intel, they took great decisions like automating the design of their processors and this made them grow at an incredible pace. The Amiga depended on a different processor that stagnated.

KerrAvon 3y ago
The 68k CPU lineup at the heart of the Amiga was competitive well into the 90's; the Amiga had run out of juice by 1989. The Amiga was only as good as the custom chips. If Commodore kept investing in R&D for the custom chips, they would have at least remained competitive.
sys_64738 3y ago
Intel never pulled ahead until the Pentium but by then Motorola weren't interested in the 68K series.

cameldrv 3y ago

I used some SGIs in the mid-late nineties, and they did have cool 3D graphics capabilities. I found 4dwm to be kind of cool but mostly gimmicky and it was really slow on the Indy and O2. Windows 95/NT were much snappier on contemporary hardware. By '97 or so SGI actually had essentially given up competing when they shut down the team that was developing the successor to InfiniteReality. In a sense though, Silicon Graphics did become more standard, in that their original 3D framework was Iris GL, which then evolved into OpenGL, which became the main 3D graphics standard for many years.