6 ms·

I guess I sort of get it, but I always kind of wondered why Silicon Graphics never made a "prosumer" computer. With the (kind of) exception of the Nintendo 64,

I guess I sort of get it, but I always kind of wondered why Silicon Graphics never made a "prosumer" computer. With the (kind of) exception of the Nintendo 64, it seems like most of the Silicon Graphics machines were tens of thousands of dollars in the 90's. I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it. For that matter, I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Nintendo had released kits for the N64 that let you use it more as a computer. I'm just thinking that it's all about timing; if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now? Would we all be using SGiPhones? Would every tech startup get all their engineers little SGI laptops?

browningstreet 2y ago
I had an Indy on my desk when it came out, with a 21" CRT monitor. I think they thought that's what the Indy was. I'd still go downstairs to another lab to play with the NeXT cube that was there. It was the culture of the time -- they didn't want to move downmarket and seem like PCs, so they (and their competitors) kept the workstation class a bit more premium and hoped to get enough business/tech purchases from the likes of academia and entertainment. They weren't really trying to sell to devs so much.
- tombert 2y ago
  I am sure there was a whole bunch of factors, but, at least from my lay perspective, it seems like a recurring theme was that these companies kind of underestimated how good even relatively cheap Intel CPUs were going to get in the 90's, making it so that even consumers could afford a pretty powerful computer, or at least powerful enough to be "useful", and then it becomes less obvious why you'd spend $5,000-15,000+ on a fancy workstation; if I can get 80% of the value of an SGI with just a decent Pentium and a bit of extra RAM, for 1/4 the cost, most people are going to go with that. Of course, I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm confident a lot of people on HN know more about this than I do, this is just a Wikipedia-level understanding of this seems to indicate to me. Still, I do like to think about it. A part of me thinks, and I have no way to confirm this, that there might have been bigger ambitions for the N64, to convert it into a "real" computer, so you could have a "real" SGI machine at home (though obviously less powerful than an Indy or something).
  - octorian 2y ago
    One thing about this period that kinda annoyed me in the tech press, is that it always felt like these companies were making new/better computers for "their existing customers" as if they were only ever competing against their own older products. Another thing, which perhaps "grinds my gears" a lot more, is that this late-90's/early-00's shift to PCs happened before Linux was sufficiently taken seriously. So lots of high-end applications that started on UNIX migrated over to Windows NT. And once you're firmly on Windows, its much harder to go to Linux. (Whereas commercial UNIX to Linux is easy.) So now there are whole markets (that used to support commercial UNIX) where Linux users get the middle finger, and as someone who hates Windows, this really ticks me off.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I hate Windows now because I'm comparing it to modern Linux and macOS, but in the 90's wasn't Windows NT pretty competitive with some of the commercial Unix offerings? I thought it had some pretty cool stuff in regards to non-blocking IO, and NTFS was pretty ahead of its time compared to most of the Unix filesystems at the time I think? I wasn't really writing code in the 90s, so it's tough for me to say with confidence, but I thought I read somewhere that Windows NT was, in some regards, objectively better than most of its competition in the 90's.
      - smackeyacky 2y ago
        This is pretty much correct. Windows NT was far better than DOS and feature competitive with the Unices of the time, along with being available on more modest hardware. The Unix wars were also raging, and compatibility between Unices still hadn't been sorted out (and arguably never was) so a company with workstation class software had to port their code between mostly compatible operating systems and wildly incompatible GUI frameworks. So shipping an NT product wasn't the big deal that it seemed.
        tombert 2y ago
        That makes sense; even within the Linux world in the year of our lord 2025, binary compatibility is still kind of an issue. I have had issues getting regular Linux binaries working in NixOS [1], and even getting stuff working between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and Fedora can be a pain. It totally makes sense why developers would see Windows NT as the future here; it gave you most of the features you'd want from Unix-land (and I think some new stuff too that wasn't available in Unix?), and having "platform to rule them all" is appealing to most developers for obvious reasons. It doesn't hurt that Win32 isn't too hard to code against (at least it wasn't when I played with it 15 years ago). I do find it a bit strange that there wasn't really a "de facto" Unix that people coded against, like a clear winner that people liked, but I guess if the hardware was too expensive to run it, that's going to cut down on usage; we didn't really get "standard Unix" until OS X. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42703720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42703720
jefflinwood 2y ago
That's kind of what they were trying to do with the 320 and 540. I worked on their e-commerce store, you could configure and buy and ship one from the web site in 1999-2000. The prices were still really high.
MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
They could have been NVidia (at best, more realistically 3dfx), but certainly not Apple.
- tombert 2y ago
  Genuine question...why not? The reason I ask, it's not like they were just making "components" like 3dfx or Nvidia at the time, they were making end-to-end workstations. Why is it such a stretch to think that they could have taken on Apple, especially since Apple in the 90s was kind of languishing?
  - bombcar 2y ago
    It was hard enough for Apple to take on Apple. Next basically tried, and only survived by being acquired. If they had wanted to survive, they needed to buy Dell at the right time.
- Fnoord 2y ago
  Back then, when SGI quit the graphics business and went to supercomputers only (having NUMA as IP, and going with Linux) the GPU devs each ended up at Nvidia. Apple had to pick Be, Inc. or NeXT (who had Jobs). They went with the latter. Be, later on, went to Palm, but that was too little, too late. SGI was one of the many Unix mastodons who fell victim of PC hardware (x86-32, then x86-64) and Windows NT, Linux being good enough, with Apple taking the piece for graphics designers and audio engineering (many whom came from Amiga, and SGI). Oh, and I forgot to mention: they bet on the Intel Itanic. I wouldn't pay a dime for these nowadays. Way too slow / inefficient W/performance. Which is really sad, but with current energy prices I just wouldn't be able to afford my Octane 2 using 1 kW anymore. I owned many SGI machines, really loved them (the sound card in the Indy was insanely good! And IndyCam from a time when hardly anyone had a webcam). Indy (various, including Challenger S), Indigo (including purple remake), Indigo 2, and Octane 2. But never an O2 :) nor a Fuel or Tezro ;) cases, although plastic and sensitive to scratches, were great aesthetical, too. While I would not want such machine anymore, I will cherish the memories though! Plus, there are some people reusing the cases. Cool beans! IMNSHO, SGI machines like Indy belong in any half decent Unix museum.
tomwheeler 2y ago
Application compatibility mattered a lot back then. There was no Microsoft Word or Excel for IRIX and Google Docs / Google Sheets didn't exist, for example. Many of the prosumers wouldn't have been able to use it as a daily driver. I recall that Adobe ported Photoshop to IRIX at one point, but I think it was gone by '97.
- tombert 2y ago
  I wonder how much of this is a chicken-egg problem though; IRIX didn't have enough of a user base to justify porting over a lot of these applications, and because they didn't have these applications it couldn't develop a user base big enough, etc. I think what you're saying is totally correct, if you're going to be spending a lot of money on a computer, you need to make sure it can actually do the stuff you need it to, and in the 90's that does more or less imply Microsoft Office compatibility. Still, I do kind of wonder if SGI had actually tried to penetrate this market, that maybe they could have made this work. They could have licensed and ported some of these applications over themselves, and if they had gotten big enough then maybe some of these companies would have ported these things over. It's tough to say.
  - kjellsbells 2y ago
    Well, they tried producing high end Windows NT machines at one point, that would have run Office, had OpenGL support, etc. But no one bought them. So its not clear that doing the same but with Irix would have gone any better. The last-gasp part of SGI I would have like to have seen develop was Cellular IRIX. If I recall it was a sort of distributed OS where the scheduler was node aware and could parcel out tasks within a single process to other nodes. What NFS did for the local/remote file system split, Irix would do for compute. Never came to fruition.
    - tombert 2y ago
      That sounds pretty cool, I guess the idea was that the scheduler could figure out smartly where to put applications and minimize latency in the process?
MisterTea 2y ago
> why Silicon Graphics never made a "prosumer" computer They were stuck in a hopeless corporate mindset where their customers were all deep pocket mega corps. You had to go through a sales process to buy one, there was no demo machine at the local computer shop. They also had a brain damaged sales team that would do things like e.g. under-spec hardware with too little RAM to make a sale leaving customers with costly hardware that struggled under loads damaging their reputation (e.g. imagine a class room full of underspecd machines leaving students thinking "this pos made Jurassic Park?"). > if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it. They would look exactly like the Indy or the later O2 which were their entry level machines. > I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Nintendo had released kits for the N64 that let you use it more as a computer. I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any substantial text work impractical (e.g. word processing or code editing). However, a better N64 fantasy IMO would be to include an optical drive in addition to the cart slot, double the RAM, increase the pitiful 4kb texture cache, then for good measure - N64 themed kb, mouse and Ethernet adapter ;-). > I'm just thinking that it's all about timing; if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", That line would be the SGI Visual Workstations. The first two, the 320 and 540 had custom motherboards with SGI chipset, RAM and GPU. The GPU used unified memory and you needed to buy expensive custom SGI RAM DIMMS. They only ever ran Win NT 4.0 and 2k because of the GPU drivers. Then there was the 230, 330, and 550 - strait up ATX Wintel boxes with Nvidia cards. My main desktop is a 550 case with a Threadripper in it. But again, IMO, they had no clue how to sell to small shops and individuals and by then, too little, too late.
- tombert 2y ago
  > I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any substantial text work impractical Yeah, in this hypothetical conversion kit they've have to give you some kind of better connections to plug into a monitor, and obviously some kind of conversion kit, maybe a double-expansion-pak, and maybe some kind of external optical drive or something similar to the N64 DD with a CD drive. I dunno, I don't think it would necessarily have failed, but we'll obviously never really know. Sony did that with the OtherOS stuff for awhile on the PS3, and I think there was a subset of people who really liked it for scientific computing.
nyrikki 2y ago
The SGI Indy was their low end line with a price starting around the $5K range which was much cheaper than the Indigo2 line. That was about the same price range as a Dell Dimension Pro150 at the time. They went on an acquisition binge in the mid 90's buying Cray, Alias, Wavefront and, Intergraph just when the PC industry busses where starting to catch up and they they announced that they were dumping MIPS and moving to Itanium.... But the sub $2k price wasn't really possible. Remember even the 256K version of the Pentium Pro was more than $1000 for the CPU alone in the mid 90's. The UNIX Wars, PC improvements, NT optimism, Itanium mess and a directionless M&A killed a lot of companies. Dec, Novell, SGI etc... Dell targeted that high end consumer market, with enthusiasts as a their target to avoid the higher support costs and low profit of the home market. As someone who was running SGI's at the turn of the century in the movie industry...nothing about SGI really promoted brand loyalty, it was a tool to run software that you needed. Once Maya was ported to linux, you were far better off running a cluster than buying more expensive SGI units. The good old days almost never were. I still remember having to re-insert the same CD what felt like dozens of time for even a simple IRIX install. I also remember that the remote install required bootp, tftp, and password-less root rsh! on the server...so you ended up using the CD's to install. That said, I do miss CXFS and CXVM, their clustered filesystem.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah that's fair, as I mentioned, I wasn't really doing anything with Silicon Graphics in the 90s, so I'm only able to look back at this stuff from a kind of historical perspective, and it's easy for these things to kind of feel more legendary than they actually were as a result. $2,000 might have been a bit ambitious, but sub $3,000 does seem like it was achievable, but it does make sense that Dell kind of swooped in and took that market. You know, it's weird, because I always kind of considered Linux as a bit of a niche geeky thing. I run it, I like it, but I always sort of felt like I was the weird one, and I think for consumers I am, but reading about this stuff it looks like Linux caught on in workstation space pretty quickly. I noticed that the expensive professional video editing software has been used in Linux for awhile, it's just the consumer and prosumer side that struggled, and as you mentioned it has had a port to Maya for quite awhile.
dekhn 2y ago
Closest thing I can think of is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation It had some custom hardware choices different from typical PCs of the day (IIRC it had a crossbar instead of a system bus. It needed a special HAL to boot NT; Windows 2000 was the last version that supported the machine. It was extremely expensive for its capabilities and everybody in my lab looked at it and concluded "SGI is dead."
gregw2 2y ago
I spent years thinking about this at the time, and wrote up a crystalized super-long "why?" in an SGI retrospective comment on an earlier thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660 which you might find of interest. Feedback from SGI insiders or pointers to HBR case studies welcome.
indymike 2y ago
> I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it. I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference as the low end of the market was driven by gaming and multimedia (i.e. movies on PC screen), and the high end of the graphics market was driven by rendering for expensive video and film production. In short, what you needed to play Fallout (1997 release) at home was an order of magnitude less than you needed to render CGI for Men in Black (1997 release). > if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now I believe Apple would have been just as successful as they are today. Software availability (e.g. Adobe and Microsoft Office) and ease of use were very good on Mac, and not so good on workstations like SGI. There was a very small, very demanding market for SGI's workstations (rendering super high quality graphics), and there was a huge market for what Apple supplied (business, print, web graphics, music production, video production). In short the software ecosystem wouldn't have happened. Apple did a great job when OSX came out of making it easy-ish for app developers to port to OSX and allowed users to run their old mac software on their new OSX powered mac. > Would we all be using SGiPhones? Probably not. System V unix was very expensive to license (hence Android being Linux based and iOS being based on BSD and Mach) and would have added considerable cost to each mobile device based on licensing at the time. A lot of what made it possible to package up a modern smartphone was open source software + low cost components with ridiculous capability (for their cost). None of this was of interest to SGI where they were focused on high-end equipment with little commodity appeal.
- sillywalk 2y ago
  I agree with the software availability, but I'll just note that Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator were ported from classic macos to Irix with a Unix porting toolkit. Adobe Framemaker was also available.
  - indymike 2y ago
    As I recall, those ports ran a version behind.
sien 2y ago
They sort of tried with a machine running Windows. The SGI Visual Workstation was meant to be that. It was quite a bit more expensive that 2K though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation Where I worked in 1999 we got one. They had a neat unified memory architecture. For some video tasks they were fantastic. But the issue was that the Intergraph had better machines for PC 3D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph Then Intergraph got eaten by Nvidia who leveraged the huge demand for gaming hardware to improve their GPUs again and again. Also Linux on x86 with Nvidia became an attractive proposition for CAD and some 3D modelling.
a-dub 2y ago
they did. it was called the moosehead. it replaced the indy and i think was the last of the mips boxen before they became a pc integrator.
- ofrzeta 2y ago
  The official name was the O2.
mixmastamyk 2y ago
The Innovators Dilemma explains this, but was not well known yet in the late 90s. In short, companies were unable to give up high profit margins, which led to their doom.

browningstreet 2y ago

I had an Indy on my desk when it came out, with a 21" CRT monitor. I think they thought that's what the Indy was. I'd still go downstairs to another lab to play with the NeXT cube that was there. It was the culture of the time -- they didn't want to move downmarket and seem like PCs, so they (and their competitors) kept the workstation class a bit more premium and hoped to get enough business/tech purchases from the likes of academia and entertainment. They weren't really trying to sell to devs so much.

tombert 2y ago
I am sure there was a whole bunch of factors, but, at least from my lay perspective, it seems like a recurring theme was that these companies kind of underestimated how good even relatively cheap Intel CPUs were going to get in the 90's, making it so that even consumers could afford a pretty powerful computer, or at least powerful enough to be "useful", and then it becomes less obvious why you'd spend $5,000-15,000+ on a fancy workstation; if I can get 80% of the value of an SGI with just a decent Pentium and a bit of extra RAM, for 1/4 the cost, most people are going to go with that. Of course, I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm confident a lot of people on HN know more about this than I do, this is just a Wikipedia-level understanding of this seems to indicate to me. Still, I do like to think about it. A part of me thinks, and I have no way to confirm this, that there might have been bigger ambitions for the N64, to convert it into a "real" computer, so you could have a "real" SGI machine at home (though obviously less powerful than an Indy or something).
- octorian 2y ago
  One thing about this period that kinda annoyed me in the tech press, is that it always felt like these companies were making new/better computers for "their existing customers" as if they were only ever competing against their own older products. Another thing, which perhaps "grinds my gears" a lot more, is that this late-90's/early-00's shift to PCs happened before Linux was sufficiently taken seriously. So lots of high-end applications that started on UNIX migrated over to Windows NT. And once you're firmly on Windows, its much harder to go to Linux. (Whereas commercial UNIX to Linux is easy.) So now there are whole markets (that used to support commercial UNIX) where Linux users get the middle finger, and as someone who hates Windows, this really ticks me off.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I hate Windows now because I'm comparing it to modern Linux and macOS, but in the 90's wasn't Windows NT pretty competitive with some of the commercial Unix offerings? I thought it had some pretty cool stuff in regards to non-blocking IO, and NTFS was pretty ahead of its time compared to most of the Unix filesystems at the time I think? I wasn't really writing code in the 90s, so it's tough for me to say with confidence, but I thought I read somewhere that Windows NT was, in some regards, objectively better than most of its competition in the 90's.
    - smackeyacky 2y ago
      This is pretty much correct. Windows NT was far better than DOS and feature competitive with the Unices of the time, along with being available on more modest hardware. The Unix wars were also raging, and compatibility between Unices still hadn't been sorted out (and arguably never was) so a company with workstation class software had to port their code between mostly compatible operating systems and wildly incompatible GUI frameworks. So shipping an NT product wasn't the big deal that it seemed.
      - tombert 2y ago
        That makes sense; even within the Linux world in the year of our lord 2025, binary compatibility is still kind of an issue. I have had issues getting regular Linux binaries working in NixOS [1], and even getting stuff working between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and Fedora can be a pain. It totally makes sense why developers would see Windows NT as the future here; it gave you most of the features you'd want from Unix-land (and I think some new stuff too that wasn't available in Unix?), and having "platform to rule them all" is appealing to most developers for obvious reasons. It doesn't hurt that Win32 isn't too hard to code against (at least it wasn't when I played with it 15 years ago). I do find it a bit strange that there wasn't really a "de facto" Unix that people coded against, like a clear winner that people liked, but I guess if the hardware was too expensive to run it, that's going to cut down on usage; we didn't really get "standard Unix" until OS X. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42703720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42703720

jefflinwood 2y ago

That's kind of what they were trying to do with the 320 and 540. I worked on their e-commerce store, you could configure and buy and ship one from the web site in 1999-2000. The prices were still really high.

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

They could have been NVidia (at best, more realistically 3dfx), but certainly not Apple.

tombert 2y ago
Genuine question...why not? The reason I ask, it's not like they were just making "components" like 3dfx or Nvidia at the time, they were making end-to-end workstations. Why is it such a stretch to think that they could have taken on Apple, especially since Apple in the 90s was kind of languishing?
- bombcar 2y ago
  It was hard enough for Apple to take on Apple. Next basically tried, and only survived by being acquired. If they had wanted to survive, they needed to buy Dell at the right time.
Fnoord 2y ago
Back then, when SGI quit the graphics business and went to supercomputers only (having NUMA as IP, and going with Linux) the GPU devs each ended up at Nvidia. Apple had to pick Be, Inc. or NeXT (who had Jobs). They went with the latter. Be, later on, went to Palm, but that was too little, too late. SGI was one of the many Unix mastodons who fell victim of PC hardware (x86-32, then x86-64) and Windows NT, Linux being good enough, with Apple taking the piece for graphics designers and audio engineering (many whom came from Amiga, and SGI). Oh, and I forgot to mention: they bet on the Intel Itanic. I wouldn't pay a dime for these nowadays. Way too slow / inefficient W/performance. Which is really sad, but with current energy prices I just wouldn't be able to afford my Octane 2 using 1 kW anymore. I owned many SGI machines, really loved them (the sound card in the Indy was insanely good! And IndyCam from a time when hardly anyone had a webcam). Indy (various, including Challenger S), Indigo (including purple remake), Indigo 2, and Octane 2. But never an O2 :) nor a Fuel or Tezro ;) cases, although plastic and sensitive to scratches, were great aesthetical, too. While I would not want such machine anymore, I will cherish the memories though! Plus, there are some people reusing the cases. Cool beans! IMNSHO, SGI machines like Indy belong in any half decent Unix museum.

tomwheeler 2y ago

Application compatibility mattered a lot back then. There was no Microsoft Word or Excel for IRIX and Google Docs / Google Sheets didn't exist, for example. Many of the prosumers wouldn't have been able to use it as a daily driver. I recall that Adobe ported Photoshop to IRIX at one point, but I think it was gone by '97.

tombert 2y ago
I wonder how much of this is a chicken-egg problem though; IRIX didn't have enough of a user base to justify porting over a lot of these applications, and because they didn't have these applications it couldn't develop a user base big enough, etc. I think what you're saying is totally correct, if you're going to be spending a lot of money on a computer, you need to make sure it can actually do the stuff you need it to, and in the 90's that does more or less imply Microsoft Office compatibility. Still, I do kind of wonder if SGI had actually tried to penetrate this market, that maybe they could have made this work. They could have licensed and ported some of these applications over themselves, and if they had gotten big enough then maybe some of these companies would have ported these things over. It's tough to say.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  Well, they tried producing high end Windows NT machines at one point, that would have run Office, had OpenGL support, etc. But no one bought them. So its not clear that doing the same but with Irix would have gone any better. The last-gasp part of SGI I would have like to have seen develop was Cellular IRIX. If I recall it was a sort of distributed OS where the scheduler was node aware and could parcel out tasks within a single process to other nodes. What NFS did for the local/remote file system split, Irix would do for compute. Never came to fruition.
  - tombert 2y ago
    That sounds pretty cool, I guess the idea was that the scheduler could figure out smartly where to put applications and minimize latency in the process?

MisterTea 2y ago

> why Silicon Graphics never made a "prosumer" computer They were stuck in a hopeless corporate mindset where their customers were all deep pocket mega corps. You had to go through a sales process to buy one, there was no demo machine at the local computer shop. They also had a brain damaged sales team that would do things like e.g. under-spec hardware with too little RAM to make a sale leaving customers with costly hardware that struggled under loads damaging their reputation (e.g. imagine a class room full of underspecd machines leaving students thinking "this pos made Jurassic Park?"). > if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it. They would look exactly like the Indy or the later O2 which were their entry level machines. > I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Nintendo had released kits for the N64 that let you use it more as a computer. I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any substantial text work impractical (e.g. word processing or code editing). However, a better N64 fantasy IMO would be to include an optical drive in addition to the cart slot, double the RAM, increase the pitiful 4kb texture cache, then for good measure - N64 themed kb, mouse and Ethernet adapter ;-). > I'm just thinking that it's all about timing; if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", That line would be the SGI Visual Workstations. The first two, the 320 and 540 had custom motherboards with SGI chipset, RAM and GPU. The GPU used unified memory and you needed to buy expensive custom SGI RAM DIMMS. They only ever ran Win NT 4.0 and 2k because of the GPU drivers. Then there was the 230, 330, and 550 - strait up ATX Wintel boxes with Nvidia cards. My main desktop is a 550 case with a Threadripper in it. But again, IMO, they had no clue how to sell to small shops and individuals and by then, too little, too late.

tombert 2y ago
> I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any substantial text work impractical Yeah, in this hypothetical conversion kit they've have to give you some kind of better connections to plug into a monitor, and obviously some kind of conversion kit, maybe a double-expansion-pak, and maybe some kind of external optical drive or something similar to the N64 DD with a CD drive. I dunno, I don't think it would necessarily have failed, but we'll obviously never really know. Sony did that with the OtherOS stuff for awhile on the PS3, and I think there was a subset of people who really liked it for scientific computing.

nyrikki 2y ago

The SGI Indy was their low end line with a price starting around the $5K range which was much cheaper than the Indigo2 line. That was about the same price range as a Dell Dimension Pro150 at the time. They went on an acquisition binge in the mid 90's buying Cray, Alias, Wavefront and, Intergraph just when the PC industry busses where starting to catch up and they they announced that they were dumping MIPS and moving to Itanium.... But the sub $2k price wasn't really possible. Remember even the 256K version of the Pentium Pro was more than $1000 for the CPU alone in the mid 90's. The UNIX Wars, PC improvements, NT optimism, Itanium mess and a directionless M&A killed a lot of companies. Dec, Novell, SGI etc... Dell targeted that high end consumer market, with enthusiasts as a their target to avoid the higher support costs and low profit of the home market. As someone who was running SGI's at the turn of the century in the movie industry...nothing about SGI really promoted brand loyalty, it was a tool to run software that you needed. Once Maya was ported to linux, you were far better off running a cluster than buying more expensive SGI units. The good old days almost never were. I still remember having to re-insert the same CD what felt like dozens of time for even a simple IRIX install. I also remember that the remote install required bootp, tftp, and password-less root rsh! on the server...so you ended up using the CD's to install. That said, I do miss CXFS and CXVM, their clustered filesystem.

tombert 2y ago
Yeah that's fair, as I mentioned, I wasn't really doing anything with Silicon Graphics in the 90s, so I'm only able to look back at this stuff from a kind of historical perspective, and it's easy for these things to kind of feel more legendary than they actually were as a result. $2,000 might have been a bit ambitious, but sub $3,000 does seem like it was achievable, but it does make sense that Dell kind of swooped in and took that market. You know, it's weird, because I always kind of considered Linux as a bit of a niche geeky thing. I run it, I like it, but I always sort of felt like I was the weird one, and I think for consumers I am, but reading about this stuff it looks like Linux caught on in workstation space pretty quickly. I noticed that the expensive professional video editing software has been used in Linux for awhile, it's just the consumer and prosumer side that struggled, and as you mentioned it has had a port to Maya for quite awhile.

dekhn 2y ago

Closest thing I can think of is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation It had some custom hardware choices different from typical PCs of the day (IIRC it had a crossbar instead of a system bus. It needed a special HAL to boot NT; Windows 2000 was the last version that supported the machine. It was extremely expensive for its capabilities and everybody in my lab looked at it and concluded "SGI is dead."

gregw2 2y ago

I spent years thinking about this at the time, and wrote up a crystalized super-long "why?" in an SGI retrospective comment on an earlier thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660 which you might find of interest. Feedback from SGI insiders or pointers to HBR case studies welcome.

indymike 2y ago

> I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it. I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference as the low end of the market was driven by gaming and multimedia (i.e. movies on PC screen), and the high end of the graphics market was driven by rendering for expensive video and film production. In short, what you needed to play Fallout (1997 release) at home was an order of magnitude less than you needed to render CGI for Men in Black (1997 release). > if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now I believe Apple would have been just as successful as they are today. Software availability (e.g. Adobe and Microsoft Office) and ease of use were very good on Mac, and not so good on workstations like SGI. There was a very small, very demanding market for SGI's workstations (rendering super high quality graphics), and there was a huge market for what Apple supplied (business, print, web graphics, music production, video production). In short the software ecosystem wouldn't have happened. Apple did a great job when OSX came out of making it easy-ish for app developers to port to OSX and allowed users to run their old mac software on their new OSX powered mac. > Would we all be using SGiPhones? Probably not. System V unix was very expensive to license (hence Android being Linux based and iOS being based on BSD and Mach) and would have added considerable cost to each mobile device based on licensing at the time. A lot of what made it possible to package up a modern smartphone was open source software + low cost components with ridiculous capability (for their cost). None of this was of interest to SGI where they were focused on high-end equipment with little commodity appeal.

sillywalk 2y ago
I agree with the software availability, but I'll just note that Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator were ported from classic macos to Irix with a Unix porting toolkit. Adobe Framemaker was also available.
- indymike 2y ago
  As I recall, those ports ran a version behind.

sien 2y ago

They sort of tried with a machine running Windows. The SGI Visual Workstation was meant to be that. It was quite a bit more expensive that 2K though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation Where I worked in 1999 we got one. They had a neat unified memory architecture. For some video tasks they were fantastic. But the issue was that the Intergraph had better machines for PC 3D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph Then Intergraph got eaten by Nvidia who leveraged the huge demand for gaming hardware to improve their GPUs again and again. Also Linux on x86 with Nvidia became an attractive proposition for CAD and some 3D modelling.

a-dub 2y ago

they did. it was called the moosehead. it replaced the indy and i think was the last of the mips boxen before they became a pc integrator.

ofrzeta 2y ago
The official name was the O2.

mixmastamyk 2y ago

The Innovators Dilemma explains this, but was not well known yet in the late 90s. In short, companies were unable to give up high profit margins, which led to their doom.