11 ms·

The Sad Saga of Silicon Graphics (1997)

138 points by gdubs 12y ago

rdtsc 12y ago
I was an intern at a CAD company back in the late 90s, and saw how in a short period of time SGI workstations had been replaced by Windows NT machines with better and faster graphics cards. You could tell SGIs were nice, a good solid build, but their time was over. They were way too expensive. I think we even leased them because buying them was too prohibitive. But I did have fun discovering by accident the file manager from Jurassic Park ( http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ ) on it. For whatever reason, I remember being really excited about that.
- freshyill 12y ago
  I hope that upon discovering it, you said aloud, "It's a Unix system, I know this!"
- frik 12y ago
  In 2000 I visited a company that designs and produces car parts. They had some SGI workstations running as far as I remember CATIA v4 (3D CAD) with big CRT monitors showing a blue background, and some big tower PCs running WinNT 4 or 2000 with CATIA v5. They told me that the car manufacturer BMW used still the older CATIA v4, so for compatibility reasons they used both software versions.
  - emmelaich 12y ago
    CATIA is the product I was going to mention. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CATIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CATIA It was ported to Windows in 1998 but anyone who knew anything could see that coming.
    - jbn 12y ago
      Actually, CATIA V4 was never ported to Windows. The next version CATIA V5 (and now V6) had Windows as one of its supported platforms.
- Animats 12y ago
  It was a surprisingly fast transition. I was working on physics engines for animation back then. In 1997, I visited Sony Pictures Imageworks in LA, where they had about 90% SGI workstations, 10% NT machines. Two years later, the ratio had reversed. What killed SGI workstations was the gamer graphics boards caught up with the high end. There used to be a high end graphics market - SGI, Evans and Sutherland, Dynamic Pictures, Fujitsu, Lockheed. It was killed when the low end got good. SGI might have survived that, but they made a number of bad decisions, including a sale/leaseback real estate deal with Goldman Sachs which locked them into long-term leases at the worst time in the market. SGI tried selling a PC that ran Windows NT, for something like $12,000. I told their sales guy that wasn't going to fly. It didn't. Most of Google's buildings in Mountain View are old SGI buildings. The Computer Museum was SGI's Digital Studio division, which never accomplished much other than installing networks for some animation studios.
  - dagw 12y ago
    I still remember back in 1999 when an animator at a studio a worked at showed up with a brand new Geforce card he'd just bought. We grabbed one of our NT machines, popped out whatever high end card was in it, put in the Geforce card and started up Maya. Watching Maya run well enough to get real work done on a card that cost a fraction of what a 'real' graphics card cost was pretty amazing. Hell for many of our common work loads there was no real difference in performance at all. Combine that with the recently released Pentium 3 CPUs and you could build yourself 3D graphics workstation out of cheap commodity parts that could really hold its own.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
    Yep. I have an SGI Indigo downstairs for just that reason. Our Mech. Engineers stopped using them to run Pro E and switched to NT boxes. Couple years later the Indigos were in the trash.
- kokey 12y ago
  I was working at a company that bought an SGI Challenge XL (I think for well over $100k). It was between 1-2 years after they bought it that we wanted to upgrade to a faster ethernet interface, but that would cost us around $3000. Instead we spent less than $10k on a Sun clone server with a NetApp filer, a combination that beat the SGI by multiples by almost any measure.
mmpozulp 12y ago
This is a really interesting article. SGI used to be a king in the Bay Area and you can still see the history if you look around. Some of Google's signs on their Mountain View campus outside of the former-SGI buildings are purple. Supposedly because they never changed it from the SGI purple or the sign changed but the purple stayed as a nod to the legacy of SGI.
NoPiece 12y ago
Interesting that Linux doesn't come up once in the article, and that it is the equally doomed Sun that is perceived as the competitor (and WinNT).
- angersock 12y ago
  Eh? WinNT had the last laugh over all of them.
  - ska 12y ago
    To my recollection, WinNT didn't acquire much of the unix server base at all - that pretty much migrated over to Linux, with the exception of massively parallel machines.
    - dagw 12y ago
      But WinNT did end up taking over most of the workstation market from SGI and Sun.
- mturmon 12y ago
  At the time, Sun was the competitor in the engineering workstation market. Later on, Sun was itself eaten. There were other bit players: DEC, HP. It used to be well-accepted to drop $18K on a baseline engineering workstation + monitor (1995-98, say -- I just checked an old quote for a Sparc Ultra that sat on my desk). It must be said that the graphics and floating-point performance of those systems well outpaced high-end PCs running Linux.
- otterley 12y ago
  In 1997 Linux didn't support SMP (multiple CPUs) yet, while Irix (SGI), Solaris (Sun) and Windows NT all did. So it wasn't a good fit at the time for server and high-end workstation installations. Sun had the lion's share of Internet server installations at the time, but Microsoft's IIS was beginning to nip at their heels. Linux was what we played with at home, because it was "close enough" to what we worked on at the office, but didn't require us to spend thousands on hardware.
nla 12y ago
This article does not even scratch the surface. Sorry but Win NT had nothing to do with it. Sale/lease back of the campus to Goldman who then turned around and sold to Google for 3x what they paid for it. 2 bankruptcies. You don't even want to know what went on there. The whole thing was a giant train wreck.
jldugger 12y ago
In 1996-7, I was on a junior high team to do virtual stock investing using mail in scantrons. We were terrible, and stock pickers. The stock I lobbied for: SGI. Singly the worst investment choice on the team. In 2000'ish, I decided to join some yahoo portfolio challenge and threw the initial pool into Geocities and jumped into a high tier spot. Junior year of college, someone in the dorm went about running a portfolio challenge, and my roommate and I slowly realized the way to win was volatility, and I eventually found an earnings report calendar on Yahoo that was essentially our rosetta stone to winning, because the guy's system let people buy in after hours at market close prices. Wake up a few minutes before market open, search the earnings calendar for stocks up in after hours trading, and place your entire portfolio in one with a huge earnings surprise. I think someone else was front running the guy's system by using a feed 5-10 minutes ahead of the Yahoo API he was using, to find a series of 1 percent per five minutes trades. In retrospect, these sorts of 'whoever has the most in 3 months wins!' competitions teach novices how to gamble and cheat, rather than allocate assets prudently. These days my retirement portfolio sits in low cost index funds.
- jacobolus 12y ago
  In spring 1998, my 6th grade class did a virtual stock investing game (using prices from the newspaper business page, with ability to change our picks once a week or so). My big picks were Dell and Lucent Technologies, and my portfolio more than doubled in the course of 2–3 months, far outpacing the second best student, who gained like 15%. Both stocks crashed within a few years after.
- Retric 12y ago
  Or go pro. People make 100's of billions of dollars every year 'cheating' in the stock market... Some of it's even completely legal. Find a hedge fund that's a little slow to update their purchase price based on market changes and eat them alive. Figure out when large trades are going to happen and remove liquidity at the right time etc etc.
  - iheartmemcache 12y ago
    How would ou 'figure out when large trades are going to happen' without violating 10b5?
gebl 12y ago
SGI's biggest mistake was selling Cray Research's business division to Sun. These became Sun's E10k machines and got them a tun of business outside of the desktop workstation market. It is probably what kept Sun around so long and why Oracle wanted to buy them. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-18/business/1996139090_1_cray-research-sun-computers-business-computer http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-18/business/1996139...
- i_am_ralpht 12y ago
  SGI wouldn't have been able to manage that business as well as Sun did; at least the E10K was successful somewhere.
  - bcantrill 12y ago
    This is absolutely true. SGI was trying to decide between shutting down Cray BSD entirely or shunting it off to Sun -- who was really the only possible buyer (their product was based on SPARC and Solaris, even when at Cray). So SGI wasn't going to make a nickel off of that product, and as such, it remains one of the best acquisitions in the history of the industry: purchased for less than $10M (I'm not sure the exact figure was ever disclosed), that product line did $1.2B in top line in its first year at Sun -- and it's hard not to have fond memories of that year. (Speaking personally, debugging a nasty performance problem on an E10K in December of 1997 helped to directly inspire DTrace[1]; I will always remember that machine fondly, despite its many quirks.) [1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1117401 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1117401
    - gebl 12y ago
      Right. Selling to Sun was the right thing for getting some nice hardware out there. Just saying, it gave Sun quite a competitive edge - probably bad idea from a business perspective. I was at Sun in that timeframe too, but not working on the E10ks :-)...
- agrostis 12y ago
  As if it helped Sun (in the long run, I mean).
icantthinkofone 12y ago
And I was there. And everyone knew who the girl was. And everyone was just too cocky and had parties on campus where toilet bowls would get broken. I haven't read the article beyond seeing the names and dates. I'll look at it in the morning and tell you more. EDIT: Had some time after all and just finished reading it. I can't add any more than was in the article but I can verify about half of it from my own time there but I was gone by 1984.
graycat 12y ago
It's an old and standard story: High end, niche, special computer hardware is soon overtaken by low end, broad market, common computer hardware. Why? Because the low end, etc. has so many more customers that, so far with Moore's law, etc., the much greater investment in progress in the low end, broad market, common computer hardware wins against the much smaller investment in the high end. Or, as was explained to me once, as maybe no more than a hypothetical example, invent a Lisp chip. Great. When running Lisp, beat the pants off all the general purpose processor chips. But just wait until the general purpose processor chips are a factor of 10 times faster and then lose out because the small volumes of the Lisp chip can't keep up with, say, Intel heading for 7 nm or some such. Besides, for graphics, where get the big business volumes, for the high end engineering graphics workstations for high end engineering or for millions of bored boys not old enough to shave yet who just love playing video games?
- yen223 12y ago
  See also: the iPhone vs Android phones.
  - mercer 12y ago
    Interesting. Perhaps this is why I Apple appears to be focusing even more than previously on being a high-end consumer product company more than relying on its vertical integration and solid hardware. There might not be room for an SGI in a world of rapidly improving, cheap, low-end technology, but there might always remain a place for a 'BMW/Porsche' company.
- icantthinkofone 12y ago
  Flight simulators. Back in the 1990s, McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis made the local sales rep the top salesman for SGI with one purchase in one year.
  - graycat 12y ago
    Yes, flight simulators for the US DoD were long one of the main drivers of high end (not so high considering what we have now) digital graphics.
doomlaser 12y ago
Strange fact: Google's headquarters in Mountain View is the old campus of Silicon Graphics. When i was there in 2007, you could still see traces of the old SGI logo in certain places.
- frik 12y ago
  related strange fact: SGI sold Cray Research's business division to SUN, Oracle bought Sun and now Facebook's headquarter is the old campus of SUN.
  - chubot 12y ago
    It's interesting but not really that strange. How many buildings/campuses in the Bay Area do you think could house companies the size of Google, Facebook, Sun, or SGI? Random guess: less than 50.
mathogre 12y ago
Can you say Vermel? VRML? That's Virtual Reality Markup Language. SGI was the champion of VRML, with Sony a somewhat distant second. It was really cool. Imagine 3D multi-media environments in a web browser. You could download 3D clip art for free. :D While SGI optimized VRML for the O2, it worked acceptably on a cough Windows machine. For a while, each week SGI produced 2 VRML animations with "Floops". I was into VRML. It was great. We even had a couple SGI reps visit our company, demonstrating VRML and the O2. Then one day they dropped support of VRML. That was the day I walked.
- STRML 12y ago
  Remember 3DML/Flatland Rover? I used to play with it constantly as a kid - it was a much simpler, block-based version of VRML. Similar in some ways to Minecraft, even, but more programming-oriented. WebGL being where it is today, I bet something like 3DML could come back in a big way.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Hehe it's weird and sad that this was too much too early. Computers, OS and browsers couldn't do much with VRML at the time, even though it's almost a fully reactive, js scriptable, 3D DOM. Also the web wasn't as mainstream, so VRML was in the fog (I only got to use it in college and because I was a CGI fan)
fernly 12y ago
From what I saw as a humble member of technical staff, the place was packed with really smart technical people, some of the sharpest people I ever worked with. One thing the management did well was to recruit and retain a very high proportion of really good people in technical staff and the first line of management. The result was some awesome (for its time) hardware and great software (IRIX). Top management was apparently locked-in to their original winning formula, to build high-end equipment and sell it to the "professional" market that needed its capacities. It was apparent to anyone technically aware that the narrow-margin PC hardware was rapidly eroding the performance difference that justified the higher-margin SGI gear. I seem to recall that an in-house project to build an SGI graphics card for the PCI bus was scuttled, with the result that several of the people who had worked on it left to form a PC graphics card company.
- Roboprog 12y ago
  Strangely, I worked at a place that did batch data processing on IRIX in the mid to late 90s. While we didn't even use the graphics capability of the machines, I did notice, at least in 95, that they were a hell of a lot faster than PCs (although the DEC Alpha that I used at a previous job sure gave them a run for the money). I don't know what the price difference was between the servers, but in 99 we got new servers from IBM. We learned from personal experience that the way to pronounce IBM flavored unix is "aches" (AIX). I missed IRIX after that change over, regardless of the hardware price-performance ratio. I also missed having a workstation that ran the same architecture as the prod server. Sharing a dev server sucks, as there's always some jerk who will fill up the disk.
- rythie 12y ago
  To found 3dfx? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive - which in turn went from number 1 player to bust in about 4 years.
_delirium 12y ago
A minor bit of the story that postdates this 1997 article: in the late '90s, SGI's strategy to recapture the high-end workstation market was to hitch their horse to Intel's new Itanium architecture, which they thought would allow them to position their boxes as a cut above the performance of commodity x86 workstations. That strategy may or may not have worked if the Itanium actually had x86-beating performance, but since Intel never delivered a performant Itanium it definitely didn't work.
patkai 12y ago
Do you guys remember the Disclosure movie, I think 1995? It was the coolest SGI advertisement ever. I actually watched the movie again last year, and it's still cool! Exactly at that time we had both Macs and SGI workstations at the university and the Macs didn't even come close.
davepeck 12y ago
My first full-time job out of college was as an engineer at SGI in Mountain View. This is now Google's campus! It was the summer of 1999. You can imagine how it went. In retrospect, there _was_ a silver lining: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/ https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/
frozenport 12y ago
I spoke with old timers at Cray and they were all shocked by the laxs work ethic at SGI: people coming back from months of paid vacation and not being sure it they worked there anymore.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Could that be after Sabbatical? SGI had a six week sabbatical after 4 years of work.
- i_am_ralpht 12y ago
  The Cray guys had their own funny culture as well, though. Cray was incredibly process-based, whereas SGI was entirely seat-of-the-pants product driven. Merging those two cultures was incredibly painful; ultimately the Cray guys won out and SGI became process driven[1]. There's a really twisted article in Wired after Cray got spun out where they complained about all the money they got from SGI because it came with sandals and pets-at-work-allowed rules. From the Cray culture (and some of the Cray employees) we got the IRIX release train, where we'd ship a new QA'd release every quarter. If a feature wasn't ready it just got pushed out to the next release, no big deal (sometimes this didn't work out; bizarrely one of the biggest screwups came from the CXFS guys who were working in the old Cray campus in Eagan, MN). [1]: Though as I read Zero to One it's interesting to see Theil's perspective on process-vs-product outlook. Definitely the product-driven SGI was the more optimistic one.
fit2rule 12y ago
Still got my SGI machine. I boot it up every now and then, just to have a wonder about what it would have been like if SGI had just pushed a bit harder, made a laptop, beaten Apple to the "coolest unix workstation vendor in the world" target, and so on. Frankly, I'd rather be typing this message on an SGI laptop than a MacbookPro, but that's history for you.
- justincormack 12y ago
  There was a Sun laptop around then, although very expensive.
  - ch_123 12y ago
    An Alpha one too... http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tadpole-ALPHAbook-1-OpenVMS-Alpha-Laptop-21066A-Processor-with-accessories-/200814581492 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tadpole-ALPHAbook-1-OpenVMS-Alpha-... (Note: I'm not linked to that auction, and it's over. It just happened to be the best set of pictures I could readily find of one)
  - ibisum 12y ago
    There were a couple of SGI Indy laptop prototypes in the works too, but I guess they didn't go anywhere. But .. just imagine this, all you althist'ers: what if SGI had been the one to release the tiBook, instead of Apple, and for a good price? Would we all be going into SGI stores and drooling these days? I bet that could've happened .. the spirit was there at SGI, even if the management wasn't. (It should also be noted that a lot of that spirit went elsewhere when SGI exploded: Transmeta, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Some good SGI talent even went to Apple! So .. there is a bit of SGI DNA all over the place these days, in fact ..)
  - dagw 12y ago
    Was there? I know there where one or two companies making Sparc laptops that ran Solaris, but I don't think Sun ever made a laptop.
- bluedino 12y ago
  SGI was never going to make a cheap desktop, though. Not that a loaded Mac was cheap, but a pretty basic, but usable Indy was still like $12,000. My high school 'won' one from the National Science Foundation. PC workstations weren't close in power and Windows was flaky but you could buy 5 of them for every 1 SGI machine ($5,000 PC's vs a $25,000 SGI)
martinpw 12y ago
I was at SGI via a software subsidiary from 1996-2004 so just at the peak and then riding down the long decline. I remember going to Siggraph in I think 1998 and seeing nothing but SGI machines in every booth on the show floor. One thing I recall is that at one point everyone at the company was told to read "The Innovator's Dilemma", which is of course the tale of large dominant companies having their market share eaten from below. Some people say SGI didn't see it coming - I think what was interesting was that they did see it coming but still structural issues prevented the taking of any effective action (for example salesforce commissions continued to encourage sales of large systems rather than the low end machines they really needed to push at the point.) There was also an internal news group called sgi.bad-attitude where you got to find out what was really going on in the company. I believe the idea was brought over from Netscape via Jim Clark, but it was impressive to have a forum where you could say just about anything and not be censored. That is where I learned things were over long before it became apparent to the outside world, or even much of the company.
- leoc 12y ago
  Speaking of disruption, what's funny is the extent to which SGI was done in by id Software.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Re: sgi.bad-attitude. Yes, Netscape did have an mcom.bad-attitude, but the order is reversed, it was brought over from SGI to Netscape (or mosaic communications as it was originally known - we never did manage to get mcom fully removed from everything). Six week sabbatical after 4 years was another nifty SGI attribute that made it's way to Netscape as well.
- mercer 12y ago
  > Some people say SGI didn't see it coming - I think what was interesting was that they did see it coming but still structural issues prevented the taking of any effective action (for example salesforce commissions continued to encourage sales of large systems rather than the low end machines they really needed to push at the point.) It's interesting how knowledge of a (potential) problem often does not protect against that problem. As a psychologist it's one of my biggest fascinations: how people who work with addicts can become addicts themselves, how people who know of the 'evils' of racism are still susceptible to it, or how people who are professional psychologists do not deal with their own issues.
another_jerk 12y ago
in retrospect, thank you SGI, for XFS filesystem. http://xfs.org/ http://xfs.org/
ddingus 12y ago
Ahhh IRIX. Best computing experience I've ever had. R.I.P. SGI.
coldcode 12y ago
"Now, McCracken and Ewald have a chance to avoid Apple's fate." Since I was there at Apple while SGI was imploding, it's fun to read what people said then and see what happened. It wasn't fun at the time of course.
metaobject 12y ago
IRIX was how I got hooked on zsh. There was something beautiful about the toaster-like O2 that I had on my desk. That machine had some rather impressive graphics abilities (for the time) and was a pleasure to use. It was similar to modern-day Apple products in its beauty.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  I always always jealous of those workstations. To this day whenever I set up a new desktop I always make the window titles with black italics on a grey stripe. Just because that was so cool.
tbyehl 12y ago
I keep an O2 on a shelf in my man cave. Wish I'd snagged an Origin 2000 rack when they were plentiful and cheap-ish on eBay about 10 years ago. I'd always wondered how SGI missed the Internet wave relative to Sun. Around the time of this article I started working for a web hosting company that was, aside from my team of IIS upstarts, entirely run on SGI. Prior to that I'd worked for a content company that was running on Tandem-badged SGI systems. And before that I was with an ISP which was a motley mix of Sun, BSD, and Linux but had just purchased a pair of Onyx systems to handle Usenet services.
- kjs3 12y ago
  AOL had vast numbers of SGI machines of all types, both servers and workstations.
cartoonfoxes 12y ago
Their industrial design was so gorgeous it makes me cry. I have an Octane2 at home, and what I wouldn't give for that kind of build quality, design, and integration in a modern workstation.
- leetrout 12y ago
  Does is still operate? Mine is not booting- I don't remember the POST but the fans do turn on. I tried reseating the ram the last time I was bored and pulled it out of the closet. I would really like to see the IRIX UI brought up to modern standards. I almost feel like I'm looking at it when I look at launch pad in OS X.
  - martinpw 12y ago
    There is a project called 5dwm which was an attempt to get an IRIX-like UI on Linux. I tried it once and it got me all nostalgic. I don't think it is being maintained or updated though
- angersock 12y ago
  I had a few kids in college talking about how nice their Apple whateverbooks were...I'd just laugh and mention my Indigo2 and O2. Scrubs.
Roboprog 12y ago
It's funny how this article bemoans the state of Apple. I suppose at the time after languishing under the Pepsi salesman for a decade, they were in trouble. Now, Apple is pretty much the primary source of graphics workstations running unix.
at-fates-hands 12y ago
For Jermoluk's part, he says he does not recall the incident. ''Am I guilty of getting drunk a few times?'' he asks. ''Sure. Probably inappropriately at times? Yeah. Did I party hard? Sure.'' But he also adds: ''Was I leading a wild life? No. I was working too hard, man.'' Even Jermoluk's critics say this never impaired his job performance, but such overindulgence by the company's No.2 rattled some employees' confidence. ''People aren't used to seeing the president get drunk,'' says a former executive. It's funny to think this was pretty common during the first dot com boom and bust years. I had an executive at Best Buy tell me a few years back about how the bust changed a lot of attitudes with how executives should act in front of the company employees.
peter303 12y ago
repeated with every new tech platform, e.g. Balcberry and samrtphones in this case PCs with GPUs because an order of magnitude cheaper than graphics workstations
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Tloewald 12y ago
Back in the day, we used to laugh at how awful IRIX was (a colleague who used an SGI box to run an F-18 flight simulator said IRIX leaked 512MB of RAM a day on idle -- back when 512MB of RAM was more than any desktop computer had; we had SGI sales reps visit our office and just getting their presentation software to work (on their hardware) was a major production. Essentially, once 3D acceleration went mainstream the writing was on the wall -- within 3 years of the first 3dfx video cards, a game box had more graphics horsepower than tens of thousands of dollars worth of SGI junk, and 3DS Max was enormously more productive for most things than Power Animator/Maya (Maya has improved a lot). The company I worked at in 1999 did the special effects for season one of Farscape on SGI. They were underbid on season two by a factor of two by Animal Logic (across the street) doing everything on fast PCs running 3DS Max. Edit: and when the writing was on the wall, SGI decided to go downmarket and fight Apple on its home turf -- porting its software to NT and competing against PC workstation vendors already running AutoCAD and 3DS Max. This allowed everyone to see the emperor had no clothes -- SGI's NT boxes were half as fast and twice as expensive as name brand competitors, and they were charging $20k for a software license.
- gdubs 12y ago
  > a game box had more graphics horsepower than tens of thousands of dollars worth of SGI junk Interestingly, at least one of those game boxes (Nintendo 64) was actually powered by SGI technology. [1] 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCP_(chip) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCP_(chip)

138 points by gdubs 12y ago

rdtsc 12y ago

I was an intern at a CAD company back in the late 90s, and saw how in a short period of time SGI workstations had been replaced by Windows NT machines with better and faster graphics cards. You could tell SGIs were nice, a good solid build, but their time was over. They were way too expensive. I think we even leased them because buying them was too prohibitive. But I did have fun discovering by accident the file manager from Jurassic Park ( http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ ) on it. For whatever reason, I remember being really excited about that.

freshyill 12y ago
I hope that upon discovering it, you said aloud, "It's a Unix system, I know this!"
frik 12y ago
In 2000 I visited a company that designs and produces car parts. They had some SGI workstations running as far as I remember CATIA v4 (3D CAD) with big CRT monitors showing a blue background, and some big tower PCs running WinNT 4 or 2000 with CATIA v5. They told me that the car manufacturer BMW used still the older CATIA v4, so for compatibility reasons they used both software versions.
- emmelaich 12y ago
  CATIA is the product I was going to mention. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CATIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CATIA It was ported to Windows in 1998 but anyone who knew anything could see that coming.
  - jbn 12y ago
    Actually, CATIA V4 was never ported to Windows. The next version CATIA V5 (and now V6) had Windows as one of its supported platforms.
Animats 12y ago
It was a surprisingly fast transition. I was working on physics engines for animation back then. In 1997, I visited Sony Pictures Imageworks in LA, where they had about 90% SGI workstations, 10% NT machines. Two years later, the ratio had reversed. What killed SGI workstations was the gamer graphics boards caught up with the high end. There used to be a high end graphics market - SGI, Evans and Sutherland, Dynamic Pictures, Fujitsu, Lockheed. It was killed when the low end got good. SGI might have survived that, but they made a number of bad decisions, including a sale/leaseback real estate deal with Goldman Sachs which locked them into long-term leases at the worst time in the market. SGI tried selling a PC that ran Windows NT, for something like $12,000. I told their sales guy that wasn't going to fly. It didn't. Most of Google's buildings in Mountain View are old SGI buildings. The Computer Museum was SGI's Digital Studio division, which never accomplished much other than installing networks for some animation studios.
- dagw 12y ago
  I still remember back in 1999 when an animator at a studio a worked at showed up with a brand new Geforce card he'd just bought. We grabbed one of our NT machines, popped out whatever high end card was in it, put in the Geforce card and started up Maya. Watching Maya run well enough to get real work done on a card that cost a fraction of what a 'real' graphics card cost was pretty amazing. Hell for many of our common work loads there was no real difference in performance at all. Combine that with the recently released Pentium 3 CPUs and you could build yourself 3D graphics workstation out of cheap commodity parts that could really hold its own.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
  Yep. I have an SGI Indigo downstairs for just that reason. Our Mech. Engineers stopped using them to run Pro E and switched to NT boxes. Couple years later the Indigos were in the trash.
kokey 12y ago
I was working at a company that bought an SGI Challenge XL (I think for well over $100k). It was between 1-2 years after they bought it that we wanted to upgrade to a faster ethernet interface, but that would cost us around $3000. Instead we spent less than $10k on a Sun clone server with a NetApp filer, a combination that beat the SGI by multiples by almost any measure.

mmpozulp 12y ago

This is a really interesting article. SGI used to be a king in the Bay Area and you can still see the history if you look around. Some of Google's signs on their Mountain View campus outside of the former-SGI buildings are purple. Supposedly because they never changed it from the SGI purple or the sign changed but the purple stayed as a nod to the legacy of SGI.

NoPiece 12y ago

Interesting that Linux doesn't come up once in the article, and that it is the equally doomed Sun that is perceived as the competitor (and WinNT).

angersock 12y ago
Eh? WinNT had the last laugh over all of them.
- ska 12y ago
  To my recollection, WinNT didn't acquire much of the unix server base at all - that pretty much migrated over to Linux, with the exception of massively parallel machines.
  - dagw 12y ago
    But WinNT did end up taking over most of the workstation market from SGI and Sun.
mturmon 12y ago
At the time, Sun was the competitor in the engineering workstation market. Later on, Sun was itself eaten. There were other bit players: DEC, HP. It used to be well-accepted to drop $18K on a baseline engineering workstation + monitor (1995-98, say -- I just checked an old quote for a Sparc Ultra that sat on my desk). It must be said that the graphics and floating-point performance of those systems well outpaced high-end PCs running Linux.
otterley 12y ago
In 1997 Linux didn't support SMP (multiple CPUs) yet, while Irix (SGI), Solaris (Sun) and Windows NT all did. So it wasn't a good fit at the time for server and high-end workstation installations. Sun had the lion's share of Internet server installations at the time, but Microsoft's IIS was beginning to nip at their heels. Linux was what we played with at home, because it was "close enough" to what we worked on at the office, but didn't require us to spend thousands on hardware.

nla 12y ago

This article does not even scratch the surface. Sorry but Win NT had nothing to do with it. Sale/lease back of the campus to Goldman who then turned around and sold to Google for 3x what they paid for it. 2 bankruptcies. You don't even want to know what went on there. The whole thing was a giant train wreck.

jldugger 12y ago

In 1996-7, I was on a junior high team to do virtual stock investing using mail in scantrons. We were terrible, and stock pickers. The stock I lobbied for: SGI. Singly the worst investment choice on the team. In 2000'ish, I decided to join some yahoo portfolio challenge and threw the initial pool into Geocities and jumped into a high tier spot. Junior year of college, someone in the dorm went about running a portfolio challenge, and my roommate and I slowly realized the way to win was volatility, and I eventually found an earnings report calendar on Yahoo that was essentially our rosetta stone to winning, because the guy's system let people buy in after hours at market close prices. Wake up a few minutes before market open, search the earnings calendar for stocks up in after hours trading, and place your entire portfolio in one with a huge earnings surprise. I think someone else was front running the guy's system by using a feed 5-10 minutes ahead of the Yahoo API he was using, to find a series of 1 percent per five minutes trades. In retrospect, these sorts of 'whoever has the most in 3 months wins!' competitions teach novices how to gamble and cheat, rather than allocate assets prudently. These days my retirement portfolio sits in low cost index funds.

jacobolus 12y ago
In spring 1998, my 6th grade class did a virtual stock investing game (using prices from the newspaper business page, with ability to change our picks once a week or so). My big picks were Dell and Lucent Technologies, and my portfolio more than doubled in the course of 2–3 months, far outpacing the second best student, who gained like 15%. Both stocks crashed within a few years after.
Retric 12y ago
Or go pro. People make 100's of billions of dollars every year 'cheating' in the stock market... Some of it's even completely legal. Find a hedge fund that's a little slow to update their purchase price based on market changes and eat them alive. Figure out when large trades are going to happen and remove liquidity at the right time etc etc.
- iheartmemcache 12y ago
  How would ou 'figure out when large trades are going to happen' without violating 10b5?

gebl 12y ago

SGI's biggest mistake was selling Cray Research's business division to Sun. These became Sun's E10k machines and got them a tun of business outside of the desktop workstation market. It is probably what kept Sun around so long and why Oracle wanted to buy them. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-18/business/1996139090_1_cray-research-sun-computers-business-computer http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-18/business/1996139...

i_am_ralpht 12y ago
SGI wouldn't have been able to manage that business as well as Sun did; at least the E10K was successful somewhere.
- bcantrill 12y ago
  This is absolutely true. SGI was trying to decide between shutting down Cray BSD entirely or shunting it off to Sun -- who was really the only possible buyer (their product was based on SPARC and Solaris, even when at Cray). So SGI wasn't going to make a nickel off of that product, and as such, it remains one of the best acquisitions in the history of the industry: purchased for less than $10M (I'm not sure the exact figure was ever disclosed), that product line did $1.2B in top line in its first year at Sun -- and it's hard not to have fond memories of that year. (Speaking personally, debugging a nasty performance problem on an E10K in December of 1997 helped to directly inspire DTrace[1]; I will always remember that machine fondly, despite its many quirks.) [1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1117401 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1117401
  - gebl 12y ago
    Right. Selling to Sun was the right thing for getting some nice hardware out there. Just saying, it gave Sun quite a competitive edge - probably bad idea from a business perspective. I was at Sun in that timeframe too, but not working on the E10ks :-)...
agrostis 12y ago
As if it helped Sun (in the long run, I mean).

icantthinkofone 12y ago

And I was there. And everyone knew who the girl was. And everyone was just too cocky and had parties on campus where toilet bowls would get broken. I haven't read the article beyond seeing the names and dates. I'll look at it in the morning and tell you more. EDIT: Had some time after all and just finished reading it. I can't add any more than was in the article but I can verify about half of it from my own time there but I was gone by 1984.

graycat 12y ago

It's an old and standard story: High end, niche, special computer hardware is soon overtaken by low end, broad market, common computer hardware. Why? Because the low end, etc. has so many more customers that, so far with Moore's law, etc., the much greater investment in progress in the low end, broad market, common computer hardware wins against the much smaller investment in the high end. Or, as was explained to me once, as maybe no more than a hypothetical example, invent a Lisp chip. Great. When running Lisp, beat the pants off all the general purpose processor chips. But just wait until the general purpose processor chips are a factor of 10 times faster and then lose out because the small volumes of the Lisp chip can't keep up with, say, Intel heading for 7 nm or some such. Besides, for graphics, where get the big business volumes, for the high end engineering graphics workstations for high end engineering or for millions of bored boys not old enough to shave yet who just love playing video games?

yen223 12y ago
See also: the iPhone vs Android phones.
- mercer 12y ago
  Interesting. Perhaps this is why I Apple appears to be focusing even more than previously on being a high-end consumer product company more than relying on its vertical integration and solid hardware. There might not be room for an SGI in a world of rapidly improving, cheap, low-end technology, but there might always remain a place for a 'BMW/Porsche' company.
icantthinkofone 12y ago
Flight simulators. Back in the 1990s, McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis made the local sales rep the top salesman for SGI with one purchase in one year.
- graycat 12y ago
  Yes, flight simulators for the US DoD were long one of the main drivers of high end (not so high considering what we have now) digital graphics.

doomlaser 12y ago

Strange fact: Google's headquarters in Mountain View is the old campus of Silicon Graphics. When i was there in 2007, you could still see traces of the old SGI logo in certain places.

frik 12y ago
related strange fact: SGI sold Cray Research's business division to SUN, Oracle bought Sun and now Facebook's headquarter is the old campus of SUN.
- chubot 12y ago
  It's interesting but not really that strange. How many buildings/campuses in the Bay Area do you think could house companies the size of Google, Facebook, Sun, or SGI? Random guess: less than 50.

mathogre 12y ago

Can you say Vermel? VRML? That's Virtual Reality Markup Language. SGI was the champion of VRML, with Sony a somewhat distant second. It was really cool. Imagine 3D multi-media environments in a web browser. You could download 3D clip art for free. :D While SGI optimized VRML for the O2, it worked acceptably on a cough Windows machine. For a while, each week SGI produced 2 VRML animations with "Floops". I was into VRML. It was great. We even had a couple SGI reps visit our company, demonstrating VRML and the O2. Then one day they dropped support of VRML. That was the day I walked.

STRML 12y ago
Remember 3DML/Flatland Rover? I used to play with it constantly as a kid - it was a much simpler, block-based version of VRML. Similar in some ways to Minecraft, even, but more programming-oriented. WebGL being where it is today, I bet something like 3DML could come back in a big way.
agumonkey 12y ago
Hehe it's weird and sad that this was too much too early. Computers, OS and browsers couldn't do much with VRML at the time, even though it's almost a fully reactive, js scriptable, 3D DOM. Also the web wasn't as mainstream, so VRML was in the fog (I only got to use it in college and because I was a CGI fan)

fernly 12y ago

From what I saw as a humble member of technical staff, the place was packed with really smart technical people, some of the sharpest people I ever worked with. One thing the management did well was to recruit and retain a very high proportion of really good people in technical staff and the first line of management. The result was some awesome (for its time) hardware and great software (IRIX). Top management was apparently locked-in to their original winning formula, to build high-end equipment and sell it to the "professional" market that needed its capacities. It was apparent to anyone technically aware that the narrow-margin PC hardware was rapidly eroding the performance difference that justified the higher-margin SGI gear. I seem to recall that an in-house project to build an SGI graphics card for the PCI bus was scuttled, with the result that several of the people who had worked on it left to form a PC graphics card company.

Roboprog 12y ago
Strangely, I worked at a place that did batch data processing on IRIX in the mid to late 90s. While we didn't even use the graphics capability of the machines, I did notice, at least in 95, that they were a hell of a lot faster than PCs (although the DEC Alpha that I used at a previous job sure gave them a run for the money). I don't know what the price difference was between the servers, but in 99 we got new servers from IBM. We learned from personal experience that the way to pronounce IBM flavored unix is "aches" (AIX). I missed IRIX after that change over, regardless of the hardware price-performance ratio. I also missed having a workstation that ran the same architecture as the prod server. Sharing a dev server sucks, as there's always some jerk who will fill up the disk.
rythie 12y ago
To found 3dfx? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive - which in turn went from number 1 player to bust in about 4 years.

_delirium 12y ago

A minor bit of the story that postdates this 1997 article: in the late '90s, SGI's strategy to recapture the high-end workstation market was to hitch their horse to Intel's new Itanium architecture, which they thought would allow them to position their boxes as a cut above the performance of commodity x86 workstations. That strategy may or may not have worked if the Itanium actually had x86-beating performance, but since Intel never delivered a performant Itanium it definitely didn't work.

patkai 12y ago

Do you guys remember the Disclosure movie, I think 1995? It was the coolest SGI advertisement ever. I actually watched the movie again last year, and it's still cool! Exactly at that time we had both Macs and SGI workstations at the university and the Macs didn't even come close.

davepeck 12y ago

My first full-time job out of college was as an engineer at SGI in Mountain View. This is now Google's campus! It was the summer of 1999. You can imagine how it went. In retrospect, there _was_ a silver lining: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/ https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/

frozenport 12y ago

I spoke with old timers at Cray and they were all shocked by the laxs work ethic at SGI: people coming back from months of paid vacation and not being sure it they worked there anymore.

ghshephard 12y ago
Could that be after Sabbatical? SGI had a six week sabbatical after 4 years of work.
i_am_ralpht 12y ago
The Cray guys had their own funny culture as well, though. Cray was incredibly process-based, whereas SGI was entirely seat-of-the-pants product driven. Merging those two cultures was incredibly painful; ultimately the Cray guys won out and SGI became process driven[1]. There's a really twisted article in Wired after Cray got spun out where they complained about all the money they got from SGI because it came with sandals and pets-at-work-allowed rules. From the Cray culture (and some of the Cray employees) we got the IRIX release train, where we'd ship a new QA'd release every quarter. If a feature wasn't ready it just got pushed out to the next release, no big deal (sometimes this didn't work out; bizarrely one of the biggest screwups came from the CXFS guys who were working in the old Cray campus in Eagan, MN). [1]: Though as I read Zero to One it's interesting to see Theil's perspective on process-vs-product outlook. Definitely the product-driven SGI was the more optimistic one.

fit2rule 12y ago

Still got my SGI machine. I boot it up every now and then, just to have a wonder about what it would have been like if SGI had just pushed a bit harder, made a laptop, beaten Apple to the "coolest unix workstation vendor in the world" target, and so on. Frankly, I'd rather be typing this message on an SGI laptop than a MacbookPro, but that's history for you.

justincormack 12y ago
There was a Sun laptop around then, although very expensive.
- ch_123 12y ago
  An Alpha one too... http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tadpole-ALPHAbook-1-OpenVMS-Alpha-Laptop-21066A-Processor-with-accessories-/200814581492 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tadpole-ALPHAbook-1-OpenVMS-Alpha-... (Note: I'm not linked to that auction, and it's over. It just happened to be the best set of pictures I could readily find of one)
- ibisum 12y ago
  There were a couple of SGI Indy laptop prototypes in the works too, but I guess they didn't go anywhere. But .. just imagine this, all you althist'ers: what if SGI had been the one to release the tiBook, instead of Apple, and for a good price? Would we all be going into SGI stores and drooling these days? I bet that could've happened .. the spirit was there at SGI, even if the management wasn't. (It should also be noted that a lot of that spirit went elsewhere when SGI exploded: Transmeta, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Some good SGI talent even went to Apple! So .. there is a bit of SGI DNA all over the place these days, in fact ..)
- dagw 12y ago
  Was there? I know there where one or two companies making Sparc laptops that ran Solaris, but I don't think Sun ever made a laptop.
bluedino 12y ago
SGI was never going to make a cheap desktop, though. Not that a loaded Mac was cheap, but a pretty basic, but usable Indy was still like $12,000. My high school 'won' one from the National Science Foundation. PC workstations weren't close in power and Windows was flaky but you could buy 5 of them for every 1 SGI machine ($5,000 PC's vs a $25,000 SGI)

martinpw 12y ago

I was at SGI via a software subsidiary from 1996-2004 so just at the peak and then riding down the long decline. I remember going to Siggraph in I think 1998 and seeing nothing but SGI machines in every booth on the show floor. One thing I recall is that at one point everyone at the company was told to read "The Innovator's Dilemma", which is of course the tale of large dominant companies having their market share eaten from below. Some people say SGI didn't see it coming - I think what was interesting was that they did see it coming but still structural issues prevented the taking of any effective action (for example salesforce commissions continued to encourage sales of large systems rather than the low end machines they really needed to push at the point.) There was also an internal news group called sgi.bad-attitude where you got to find out what was really going on in the company. I believe the idea was brought over from Netscape via Jim Clark, but it was impressive to have a forum where you could say just about anything and not be censored. That is where I learned things were over long before it became apparent to the outside world, or even much of the company.

leoc 12y ago
Speaking of disruption, what's funny is the extent to which SGI was done in by id Software.
ghshephard 12y ago
Re: sgi.bad-attitude. Yes, Netscape did have an mcom.bad-attitude, but the order is reversed, it was brought over from SGI to Netscape (or mosaic communications as it was originally known - we never did manage to get mcom fully removed from everything). Six week sabbatical after 4 years was another nifty SGI attribute that made it's way to Netscape as well.
mercer 12y ago
> Some people say SGI didn't see it coming - I think what was interesting was that they did see it coming but still structural issues prevented the taking of any effective action (for example salesforce commissions continued to encourage sales of large systems rather than the low end machines they really needed to push at the point.) It's interesting how knowledge of a (potential) problem often does not protect against that problem. As a psychologist it's one of my biggest fascinations: how people who work with addicts can become addicts themselves, how people who know of the 'evils' of racism are still susceptible to it, or how people who are professional psychologists do not deal with their own issues.

another_jerk 12y ago

in retrospect, thank you SGI, for XFS filesystem. http://xfs.org/ http://xfs.org/

ddingus 12y ago

Ahhh IRIX. Best computing experience I've ever had. R.I.P. SGI.

coldcode 12y ago

"Now, McCracken and Ewald have a chance to avoid Apple's fate." Since I was there at Apple while SGI was imploding, it's fun to read what people said then and see what happened. It wasn't fun at the time of course.

metaobject 12y ago

IRIX was how I got hooked on zsh. There was something beautiful about the toaster-like O2 that I had on my desk. That machine had some rather impressive graphics abilities (for the time) and was a pleasure to use. It was similar to modern-day Apple products in its beauty.

joezydeco 12y ago
I always always jealous of those workstations. To this day whenever I set up a new desktop I always make the window titles with black italics on a grey stripe. Just because that was so cool.

tbyehl 12y ago

I keep an O2 on a shelf in my man cave. Wish I'd snagged an Origin 2000 rack when they were plentiful and cheap-ish on eBay about 10 years ago. I'd always wondered how SGI missed the Internet wave relative to Sun. Around the time of this article I started working for a web hosting company that was, aside from my team of IIS upstarts, entirely run on SGI. Prior to that I'd worked for a content company that was running on Tandem-badged SGI systems. And before that I was with an ISP which was a motley mix of Sun, BSD, and Linux but had just purchased a pair of Onyx systems to handle Usenet services.

kjs3 12y ago
AOL had vast numbers of SGI machines of all types, both servers and workstations.

cartoonfoxes 12y ago

Their industrial design was so gorgeous it makes me cry. I have an Octane2 at home, and what I wouldn't give for that kind of build quality, design, and integration in a modern workstation.

leetrout 12y ago
Does is still operate? Mine is not booting- I don't remember the POST but the fans do turn on. I tried reseating the ram the last time I was bored and pulled it out of the closet. I would really like to see the IRIX UI brought up to modern standards. I almost feel like I'm looking at it when I look at launch pad in OS X.
- martinpw 12y ago
  There is a project called 5dwm which was an attempt to get an IRIX-like UI on Linux. I tried it once and it got me all nostalgic. I don't think it is being maintained or updated though
angersock 12y ago
I had a few kids in college talking about how nice their Apple whateverbooks were...I'd just laugh and mention my Indigo2 and O2. Scrubs.

Roboprog 12y ago

It's funny how this article bemoans the state of Apple. I suppose at the time after languishing under the Pepsi salesman for a decade, they were in trouble. Now, Apple is pretty much the primary source of graphics workstations running unix.

at-fates-hands 12y ago

For Jermoluk's part, he says he does not recall the incident. ''Am I guilty of getting drunk a few times?'' he asks. ''Sure. Probably inappropriately at times? Yeah. Did I party hard? Sure.'' But he also adds: ''Was I leading a wild life? No. I was working too hard, man.'' Even Jermoluk's critics say this never impaired his job performance, but such overindulgence by the company's No.2 rattled some employees' confidence. ''People aren't used to seeing the president get drunk,'' says a former executive. It's funny to think this was pretty common during the first dot com boom and bust years. I had an executive at Best Buy tell me a few years back about how the bust changed a lot of attitudes with how executives should act in front of the company employees.

peter303 12y ago

repeated with every new tech platform, e.g. Balcberry and samrtphones in this case PCs with GPUs because an order of magnitude cheaper than graphics workstations

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Tloewald 12y ago

Back in the day, we used to laugh at how awful IRIX was (a colleague who used an SGI box to run an F-18 flight simulator said IRIX leaked 512MB of RAM a day on idle -- back when 512MB of RAM was more than any desktop computer had; we had SGI sales reps visit our office and just getting their presentation software to work (on their hardware) was a major production. Essentially, once 3D acceleration went mainstream the writing was on the wall -- within 3 years of the first 3dfx video cards, a game box had more graphics horsepower than tens of thousands of dollars worth of SGI junk, and 3DS Max was enormously more productive for most things than Power Animator/Maya (Maya has improved a lot). The company I worked at in 1999 did the special effects for season one of Farscape on SGI. They were underbid on season two by a factor of two by Animal Logic (across the street) doing everything on fast PCs running 3DS Max. Edit: and when the writing was on the wall, SGI decided to go downmarket and fight Apple on its home turf -- porting its software to NT and competing against PC workstation vendors already running AutoCAD and 3DS Max. This allowed everyone to see the emperor had no clothes -- SGI's NT boxes were half as fast and twice as expensive as name brand competitors, and they were charging $20k for a software license.

gdubs 12y ago
> a game box had more graphics horsepower than tens of thousands of dollars worth of SGI junk Interestingly, at least one of those game boxes (Nintendo 64) was actually powered by SGI technology. [1] 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCP_(chip) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCP_(chip)