4 ms·
Poor SGI. I used to love their website back in the 90s. It's strange to think that alternative architectures were possible though and could get such a foothold
by guerrilla 8mo ago
Poor SGI. I used to love their website back in the 90s.
It's strange to think that alternative architectures were possible though and could get such a foothold in some industries. The specificity is mind-blowng. Everything is "PC"s today.
- RajT88 8mo agoIt does blow my mind that back in the 90's that companies were rolling their own silicon and OS's without being absolute giants.
- bdbdbdb 8mo agoHuh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed they made PCs with their own OS
- cvwright 8mo agoThey made a couple of Intel boxes in the very late 90s / very early 00s, but the company was already on the way out by that point.
- guerrilla 8mo agoBack then there were quite a few competing architectures and UNIXes to go with them. SGI MIPS with Irix, IBM had POWER with AIX and later Linux, DEC had Alpha Tru64 UNIX and VMS (not a UNIX), Sun SPARC with Solaris, HP had HA-RISC with HP-UX. Only SPARC and POWER survived for long and only POWER survived until today as far as I know. Solaris of course lives on in various forms. The old UNIXes I guess mostly do not, being displaced almost entirely by Linux and BSDs.
- dhosek 8mo agoI remember that SGI was superfast. I did some on-site work for a company that had an SGI workstation and I had installed TeX on it for a typesetting system I’d developed with them. When I ran the TeX process, it was so fast that the screen did not scroll as it ran, instead it just refreshed with the whole multi-line output. At first I thought something had gone wrong because I was used to waiting a few seconds for the code to run on my PC, but it turned out, no, their machines really were that fast.
- aa-jv 8mo agoImagine if they'd made the titanium laptop before Apple, and actually shipped it with Irix .. would have been amazing.