3 ms·

I was making crazy money in the dot-com boom and bought a SGI 540 in 1999 (with an SGI monitor). With money to burn SGI was a childhood brand, legends in 3D. S

I was making crazy money in the dot-com boom and bought a SGI 540 in 1999 (with an SGI monitor). With money to burn SGI was a childhood brand, legends in 3D. Such wonderful memories. 15k on a desktop setup - it was loose change, however it shows how clueless I was back then. However I'd felt like I'd "arrived". SGI with Windows NT - lol - I wrote my first OpenGL game in Visual Basic... I've always been somewhat of an outlier ;-) God help me. The point? My personal experience says something about the strength of the SGI brand - even in the face of what was happening at the time (3DFX and so on - my previous company was one of the few 3DFX api devs - illustrating how clueless I was...)... it all happened so quickly... I'm not surprised SGI couldn't respond - or more importantly understand the strength of Microsoft/OpenGL/DirectX in the boiling pot of 3DFX / Nvidia and the rest... From memory it took three years and SGI was done - shared memory architecture? No longer worth the cost. :-( Looking back, I was such a kid - a complete fool. Greybeard advice: bet on the monopoly. Be smart. Brands like SGI are nothing in the face of install base. Think about how crazy it was to spend 15k on a desktop SGI back then... nostalgia is insanity, vanity.

lizknope 3y ago
Yeah but it still sounds really cool! From 1991 when I first saw SunOS I wanted a SPARCstation. I started college in 1993 and the school was full of DEC Ultrix machines, Suns, HP PA-RISC, and a handful of IBM RS/6000 and SGIs. I just thought DOS/Windows PCs were such garbage. Single user, no preemptive, multitasking, no memory protection. Then Linux came out and it changed everything. I bought a PC just to run Linux. My dream of a Unix RISC workstation faded away. My roommate in 1996 bought a DEC Alpha. Not the cheaper Multia but an Alpha that could run OSF/1 Digital Unix. He actually ran NetBSD on it. In 1997 I took the computer graphics class and we used SGIs. There was just one lab of them reserved for that class and grad students. I was so excited and it was really cool but I didn't think I could ever afford one. It's still really cool though that you had one.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Linux on RISC-V ... Its happening ... eventually ... probably.
VelesDude 3y ago
The one thing that I always have to point out to folks who didn't live through it. The pace of change in everything was so rapid, especially in the graphics space. It is wild to think that in games for instance, we went from Quake in 1996 running software rendering to Quake 3 requiring a GPU only 3 years later and that becoming the standard in a matter of months.

lizknope 3y ago

Yeah but it still sounds really cool! From 1991 when I first saw SunOS I wanted a SPARCstation. I started college in 1993 and the school was full of DEC Ultrix machines, Suns, HP PA-RISC, and a handful of IBM RS/6000 and SGIs. I just thought DOS/Windows PCs were such garbage. Single user, no preemptive, multitasking, no memory protection. Then Linux came out and it changed everything. I bought a PC just to run Linux. My dream of a Unix RISC workstation faded away. My roommate in 1996 bought a DEC Alpha. Not the cheaper Multia but an Alpha that could run OSF/1 Digital Unix. He actually ran NetBSD on it. In 1997 I took the computer graphics class and we used SGIs. There was just one lab of them reserved for that class and grad students. I was so excited and it was really cool but I didn't think I could ever afford one. It's still really cool though that you had one.

panick21_ 3y ago
Linux on RISC-V ... Its happening ... eventually ... probably.

VelesDude 3y ago

The one thing that I always have to point out to folks who didn't live through it. The pace of change in everything was so rapid, especially in the graphics space. It is wild to think that in games for instance, we went from Quake in 1996 running software rendering to Quake 3 requiring a GPU only 3 years later and that becoming the standard in a matter of months.