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

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.