Reliving The Glory Days of SGI 386
devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""
Three degrees of seperation. (Score:5, Interesting)
Glad that there are opportunities for people to keep SGI going. I know I sure have looked at all of those eBay auctions at one time just to see what it was all about. At the current going price on some of the older hardware, I don't see what you have to lose.
Re:Three degrees of seperation. (Score:2)
I've got one up and running now (thankfully they never set the root password)..and now trying to get it to find the DNS servers...but, almost on the net now. I'm gonna try to keep at least one of them SGI, but, am also reading up on how to net-boot them...going to try to install Gentoo on a couple of them..
I've been wondering what to
Re:Three degrees of seperation. (Score:2, Flamebait)
That's okay, it runs Irix. I'm sure you could have found a local 'sploit quickly enough. Irix was famous for its lack of security.
Re:Three degrees of seperation. (Score:2)
Yeah...I'd heard that....trying to research this to lock it down as best I can before I put it on the network....
Do you know of any good info on Irix exploits and how to counteract them?
Re:Three degrees of seperation. (Score:4, Informative)
Keep it behind a firewall and you'll be fine. The Indy is a nice little box and lots of fun. I suggest keeping Irix on it, as half of the SGI experience is running Irix. I don't get people who buy every esoteric piece of hardware they can find and run the same OS on it as they do on their PC.
Great styling. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, they were pretty good at their job, but perhaps that's just a coincidence.
Re:Great styling. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great styling. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great styling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing is, after the tech bubble burst companies that before had plenty to spend all of the sudden had to cut corners, and one of the corners were the very expensive SGI workstations that could be replaced by Linux boxes or Windows PCs.
Re:Great styling. (Score:4, Interesting)
How is SGI going to compete on their volume? not at all. Workstations just aren't a big enough market. They tried, remember the visual workstations (SGI, xeons + WinNT) I don't think there's anything they could have done. Lost cause.
Re:Great styling. (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the operating system and GUI were really slickly designed at the time. They certainly had the most attractive implementation of virtual desktops I've ever seen. Linux has them, but not with the style SGI does and I have to admit that style wins points with me - especially when Linux was still lost in the world of horrible, unreadable fonts while SGI did a great job making them legible and attractive.
But then came Apple and MacOS X, which really showed the world what a truly slick Unix desktop could be like, and I switched almost immediately, leaving my Windows, SGI and Linux machines in the dust. After all, Apple could do it all in one slickly designed system.
I'm sorry SGI never took off; I think they could have been a nice consumer alternative if they could have figured out how to keep costs down. I tried to install Mozilla on my old Indigo2 about six months ago and I got bogged down in dependencies and quit, so it's just sitting in the corner.
People talk about proprietary systems being bad, and the future being in open systems and commodity hardware. And there are bad things about proprietary systems, but I love the spirit that created them, the desire to create something that was designed, not built out of tinkertoy blocks. The desire to create something where the operating system and hardware were built together in one seamless, coherent way.
Because of this, I shed a tear for the proprietary systems, built when men were men, women were women, and computers were something special instead of crudely-designed commodities.
Those days, of course, live on in the Apple world. Which, if you think of it, may be the best of both worlds - the price has been forced down by commodity machines, but it's still very much a sleek, designer experience.
Because after all, that's what I want a computer to be: Something special.
D
Re:Great styling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, companies like ILM are tearing out SGI workstations and replacing them with ultra-cheap desktops. They're taking advantage of the ability to work with low-resolution proxies in real time and then render jobs overnight on the big iron. That's a good workflow for that environment.
SGI should have been their first. They had the big iron --nobody has bigger iron, even now; SGI's supercomputers are more scalable than anybody's. They should have developed software frameworks that facilitate remote rendering of graphics operations. How? I don't know; I'm not a graphics expert. But they should have been first on that block. Then SGI could have gone to a company like ILM and said, "We'll sell you a thousand server processors and a thousand one-processor desktops for five million bucks."
Instead, SGI said, "Fuck the desktop. The server business will boom forever!" Which was a huge mistake.
SGI's failure is that they tried to adapt to the dominant paradigm instead of recognizing its limits and engineering ways to get around them. They reacted instead of created. And they lost vast sums of money in the process.
Re:Great styling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably the only thing I agree with in this post but it didn't stop you from pretending like you knew what you were talking about.
""Rocket Rick" Belluzzo saw the shift in the market, but he reacted to it in precisely the wrong way."
Actually Jim Clark saw the same shift coming long before Beluzzo got there. He knew the PC was going to cream SGI on the desktop and he was telling everyone at SGI that, they didn't want to hear it, they drove Clark out and he made a fortune on Ne
Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Military Simulation (Score:5, Informative)
That was probably the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference. [iitsec.org]
I wouldn't look to military simultion for an example of a growth area. Some of the simulators are as old as the planes themselves, 30 years and older, with upgrades every three to five years to keep them up to date. FORTRAN is still the universal language, or at least the F77 dialect. C is starting to take over, but slowly, and Ada still has a sizable presence. In general, technologies and practices lag five to ten years behind the rest of the commerical world.
On the other hand, it is fairly secure work if you can get it. Lots of people can start in simulation and retire in it, which isn't true of a lot of industries. If you can get a security clearance, you are in even better shape.
So, don't worry about international outsourcing - just become a military contractor!
I miss SGI (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw this article last week and enjoyed reading it, but at the end I was still left wondering "WHY?" I love old radios and stereo gear so I'm not unappreciative of the nostalgia aspect, but my linux desktop now is, in most ways, just as fulfilling as the old irix system I grew to love.
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop. In the end I'd rather have something gorgeously deco [eugenesargent.com] that I could keep around for years and upgrade as needed.
Re:I miss SGI (Score:4, Insightful)
A few years ago now, I had access to an old Silicon Graphics machine - a Indigo 2, or something like that. It was quite fun being able to mess around with what had originally been an incredibly expensive machine, and of playing with another UNIX I hadn't used. I even got Blender running on it...
Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself, and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS password to allow reinstallation from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM drive we'd spent weeks hunting down. There turned out to be no way of resetting that password, at least not without wiping the MAC address too. Given that the machine was only useful as an X terminal and web browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Looking inside, at the multi-boarded graphics subsystem covered with huge custom-built chips, it seemed rather sad that even a bargain-basement PC of the time would have massively outperformed it. And now, when I run Half-Life 2 on my current, elderly PC, complete with all sorts of per-pixel shaders and suchlike thanks to its inconceivably powerful (yet obsolete) Geforce 4, I think about how impressed I'd been by a couple of gouraud-shaded polygons...
The only thing I really miss is the screensaver. I forget what it was called, there's an attempted simulation in Xscreensaver called 'stonerview' or similar, but it's nowhere near as good as the original.
Re:I miss SGI (Score:3, Informative)
I have a similar problem, a working Indigo (1) that I don't know the password for the OS or the PROM. The only thing I can think of is to slap a SCSI card in my PC and compile SGI filesystem support into a kernel. Then I could rewrie the passwd file. A lot of work for an old system.
Re:I miss SGI (Score:5, Informative)
Most likely user error.
> and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS
SGI's have a PROM, it's pretty slick.
> password to allow reinstallation
Most SGIs have a jumper to reset the PROM password. It's a FAQ that should take 10 seconds to figure out. It's also in the user manual which if you don't have you can download off of techpubs.sgi.com. You could also have posted on any of the comp.sys.sgi groups and after people flame you for asking a FAQ someone would tell you what to do.
> from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM
> drive we'd spent weeks hunting down.
I've never had a SCSI CD-ROM that wouldn't boot IRIX. Any Toshiba drive will work.
> There turned out to be no way of resetting
> that password, at least not without wiping
> the MAC address too. Given that the machine
> was only useful as an X terminal and web
> browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Sad indeed because all you needed to do was set a jumper.
This is one of the reasons I don't listen to most people's opinions unless it's pretty clear they're experts. It makes more sense to figure it our yourself. Too many times I hear people have immense difficulty or distaste for something and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing. Kinda like the people in infomercials who can't chop an onion or coil up a garden hose or rake leaves.
Or maybe it's more like a Ferrari. Lottery winners will abuse their high performance cars and then complain when something goes wrong ("stupid imported piece of junk!"). In fact this is so common many long-time Ferrari owner's have a name for these type of people: gold-chainers.
To be sure SGI systems have their quirks but most of the negative things you hear about them are not true. I'd encourage people to pick one up and see for themselves but then I don't want to drive up prices
Re:I miss SGI (Score:3, Informative)
Done a quick bit of research - it would appear it was an Indigo, not an Indigo 2 - one of the few machines without the jumper.
And yes, I did download the user manual, ask on the SGI newsgroups, and I even consulted the university's SGI administrator for his advice. The general response? Get IRIX booting in order to run the appropriate password-reset utility, or the machine is unusable.
So, we borrowed
Re:I miss SGI (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I miss SGI (Score:2)
SGI failed to keep up with CPU developments and were stuck with MIPS and Alpha based systems. Two rather dead platforms (MIPS are used in consoles like the PS2 though).
They did venture into the NT market and their x86 hardware was still unique as it featured UMA instead of memory buses. But was the hardware cost justifiable? probably not.
The low-end ones sucked, but still... (Score:2)
When I joined a friend's startup in '94 we where mightily proud to get an entry-level Indy for a super-special academic discount (we were still an academic group when we bought the machine) for 16000 DM (about 8000 EUR today). I was absolutely in love with the machine until we purchased six months later our first P5/90 for less than a quarter of the price. Runn
They should get back in and write off any loss (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the publicity SGI got from this end of the business helped the rest of their business. They'd probably disagree, at least at the point they got out of the business.
But via the publicity from this ariticle, /., and others talking, maybe SGI will re-think this. Heck any loss they get from low sales will be offset by the overall corporate business increase, I bet. It's worth the shot.
No wonder why they go down... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No wonder why they go down... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not just SGI (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:5, Insightful)
You think so? Or was it a case of the UNIX workstation companies not evolving quickly enough to mach price/performance?
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
Companies used to buy high-priced workstations because they really got their money's worth in terms of differences with respect to 'commodity' PCs. PCs were of course more expensive, and reliability of hardware and software (Linux was immature/nonexistant depending on time period, Windows before W2k was too flaky to seriously consider a contender), and the performance was crappy. Professional workstations ran good, solid OSes, had clean system designs overal
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:2, Insightful)
Gee, I think Apple [apple.com] would disagree.
Re:Your sig (Score:2)
There is a joke, maybe a maxim better describes it, that Linux will not succeed on the desktop until it is easy enough for a grandma to use.
One day I realized that every time I use Google I "use" an entire bank of Linux servers. And quite ironically, I also realized that since most people use Internet Explorer, Microsoft provides the biggest front-end for Linux, when you combine Google with all the sites runni
Re:Your sig (Score:2)
Re:Your sig (Score:2)
3 reasons why they will go down.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:3 reasons why they will go down.... (Score:3, Insightful)
In our shop we have many large SGI's (128CPU +), IBM Regatta's, Sunfire's, Linux Clusters, and Sun Clusters. They each solve the requirements for
Re:3 reasons why they will go down.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
As to Clusters killing the big server? Nope. IBM is selling a good number of there Z-machines and the I series also seems alive and kicking.
Clusters are great systems for some problems while while lots of cheap boxes are good for there problems line web front ends. For Databases an IBM Z-server running DB2 is killer. Uptime th
Because IBM and Sun still are making CPUs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Because IBM and Sun still are making CPUs (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely. We had a Sun guy come and give us a demo of Solaris 10. I can't wait to play with dtrace, it looks absolutely amazing.
I wonder whether Linux will ever get something like it. We can hope! :)
Cheers,
Roger
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:2)
It's like you had two different thoughts, and they accidently collided in the same post
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux has probably done more to hurt that industry as help it. Sure, you have IBM and others dealing in Linux on their servers but all of those others that still exist are either gone or are so specialized that few/no new customers are coming to them.
As far as Sun, except for a few applications that are basically binary only Solaris, there's no real reason to buy a SPARC based machine today either. Linux + Intel/AMD has the basic workstation UNIX wor
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:2)
While I agree with you largely...there is one BIG exception to this...the US Gov. And they're a pretty big customer. You can't get them to commit to use Linux for a large project..although it sneaks in here and there...largely if you're going to do a
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:2)
I work for a major MCAD company, and we still develop for Sun, IBM, and HP workstations. One customer comes to mind that buys thousands of Sun seats, and you can bet they're buying the latest workstations.
And yes, we also port to 64-bit linux and 32-bit/64-bit Windows. The market is beginning to move
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:2)
Sun - good os
Sgi - great cxfs and decent graphics
HP - scales well
But you notice the problem, not one platform dominates enough to destroy the competition.
Support is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to get a more up-to-date version of Irix on it, but going from the 6.5.0 disks that I have to the most current releases is a pain. A big pain. A pain that makes the most b0rk3d RPM install look like a hot bath with a supermodel.
I don't want a full support contract from SGI - for a 150MHz machine that would be a total waste of time and money.
What I'd *love* would be a way to get a set of current disks for, say US$30, with the disclaimer "You are on your own. Don't call us, we won't call you."
I've been looking at putting Linux on it, just to have a bit more "support" on the machine. Now that the video subsystem is a bit better supported I may just do that.
Re:Support is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, IRIX while very powerful, can be troublesome. When I let the support contract run out on my O2, I had a video card go bad and damn!, it took me a whole day to replace the card and get IRIX to recognize things again. OS X is soooo much more plug and play. If you like *nix, give OS X a try.
Re:Support is the problem (Score:3, Informative)
inst (and its X frontend swmgr) are among the best software
Re:Support is the problem (Score:2)
Re:Support is the problem (Score:2)
Then your experience is vastly different than mine.
I have downloaded the updates from SGI. However, when I attempt to install them, inst wants to remove just about everything it can from my system - like the main software operating environment!
Yes, I have opened all the original disks as well as the updates - still swmgr wants to remove all sorts of things. Dependancy hell times 1E6!
I would KILL for Synap
Re:Support is the problem (Score:2)
Re:Support is the problem (Score:2)
I'm looking at trying THIS Install [gentoo.org] ...
I'm reading up now on the net-boot procedure and setup as that is new to me, and my Indy's doing have any floppy/CD with them...
YES! (Score:2)
On and as for Open Source support, the ONLY SGIs that are supported are the O2s and their support is fledgling at best.
SGI boxes are beautiful and (for their time) powerful... but face it they're worthless to the hobbyist market.
Re:Support is the problem (Score:2)
NetBSD MIPS is a wonderful thing, though
I'm running it on an O2 named Laz [seekingfire.com] and it's been both reliable and ``normal'' enough that I can treat it like any other BSD box I have. It runs headless, which is fine for what I use it for, but I'd like to see decent X support for it in NetBSD.
Video better than $2000 Mac? (Score:3, Interesting)
When it comes to video, a $2,000 Mac still doesn't have the same capabilities as an SGI machine.
I thought Macs are known for their media handling capability. The fact that you can get one of those 10+ year old SGI machines for dirt cheap now and get better video editing is a bit shocking. Then again, the quote includes the word "capabilities", so perhaps that does not necessarily reflect performance/processing speed.
Re:Video better than $2000 Mac? (Score:2)
In terms of number crunching a modern computer blows it way by a massive factor, but for the a
Re:Video better than $2000 Mac? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the trouble with "generic" computers/OSs such as Mac and the PC -- they're aiming at doing everything, and accordingly, they cannot excel at any one thing like a specifically designed machine/OS can.
That said, Macs still spank PCs at video and typography, and PCs still spank Macs at games and.. I guess.. office. There's some specialization in the Mac and PC world, just not as balls-to-the-wall as SGI.
On a side note, I used to do texture mapping for the early incarnation of the Alice project ( www.alice3d.org, but back in '96 when it was still at UVa ). We used an SGI Reality Engine, and it made my hairs stand up it was so powerful. I remember once I crashed it -- by accidently pressing the middle button on the haxored broken mouse which was taped and labeled "Don't press me" -- and we had to go to the server room to reboot it. This was my first exposure to a *real* computer, and seeing that it was rebooted by turning a key blew my mind.
I have to say, though, that crashing a server by clicking the (admittedly broken) middle mouse button on a terminal is pretty appalling. Something was clearly Very Wrong in the setup.
Re:Video better than $2000 Mac? (Score:4, Informative)
Heck, I use a Powerbook G4 for most of my tasks these days and my SGI O2 and SGI 320 NT box in my office are used little these days, but the Macs do lack some advanced hardware features that are only available on Infinite Reality gfx boards and Tezro v12. See Discreet's website and you'll notice that Flame, Inferno and Fire still run on ONLY SGI hardware. SGI InfiniteReality boards are used as image generators for flight military flight simulators and also to drive the Inferno compositing and film mastering, using up to 32 film resolution layers and 10-bit anti-aliased graphics
Sure, Nvidia and ATI cards go have an polygon count advantage and they do have features like pixel and vertex shaders, but overall for high fidelity graphics one still goes back to SGIs. If one looks at what is capable in Final Cut Pro HD, it still falls in terms of output quality compared to what an SGI can handle. For video DMediaPro options with support for two streams of high-definition 10-bit 4:4:4:4 RGBA video. Or if one needed to generate your own video signal. Programmable FPGA video card or drive a C.A.V.E. or Powerwall SGI Mutichannel Option cards are capable of doing this. I have yet to see PC based Image Generator be as successful at doing this without a lot of hacking, blood, sweat and tears. SGI's handle the tough visualization tasks do out of the box. SGI's gfx API are second to none
OpenGL Inventor
OpenGL Multipipe (+ SDK)
OpenGL Optimizer
OpenGL Performer
OpenGL Shader
OpenGL Vizserver
OpenGL Volumizer
ImageVision and Image Format Library (IFL)
SGI was a great company, although it was badly mismanaged. I'd love to see it merged with Apple and all the SGI gfx API's integrated into OS X. Plus other tecnologies like ccNUMA, XFS, CXFS, NUMAlink4 (6.4GBs), NUMAflex combined with Hypertransport and Infiniband (when customers need cheaper solution than NUMAlink)
My main problem... (Score:2, Insightful)
Using their latest release and overlays I still have dependencies that can not be met. It can be frustrating to anyone who is used to a sane installer, like the ones provided with Solaris, HP-UX and most Linux distros.
Filesystems were not recreated sometimes when I made the install, and configurations were left on the system. I'm not a Unix god, but that is not how most operating systems install, or how I think t
IRIS Workstation (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days?
I used an SGI Iris 24 bit color workstation with a 21" monitor back in 1990. I still get misty thinking about it. We used them for computational chemistry and visualization. Shading, transparency, GL had it all even back then. Coming as I did from a Vax 750 background, this was pretty amazing. The workstation came with a flight simulator to show off GL graphic power. These were beautiful machines, solid, well engineered. The aethetics have not been surpassed to this day. Sadly, some business guy tried to turn SGI into a PC company, and they alienated their devoted scientific and engineering users. Same thing happened to Sun except they sold out to corporate IT and big iron.
Re:IRIS Workstation (Score:2)
One evening, I went to dinner with a friend, but we forgot who was driving, and both ended up drunk. (one car at the restaurant, one at the office)
We took a cab back to work and flew P38s in dogfight mode until we sobered up. Don't do this without a helmet, or at least don't use swivel chairs.
Re:IRIS Workstation (Score:2)
Believe it or not, that same guy after trying to get SGI to switch to Windows then went to work for Microsoft. Seriously!
Re:IRIS Workstation (Score:3, Funny)
Jeff Belluzo, or however his name is spelt. I read recently that before SGI he was the CEO of HP (or DEC? somewhere) and had pretty much done the exact same thing there as well.
Re:IRIS Workstation (Score:4, Informative)
He did the same thing at HP and/or DEC, and later went on to a nice high executive position at Microsoft. Coincidence? I think not!
sgi glory... (Score:3, Informative)
I still get funny questions from friends that notice it on my antec case at home and is the best looking company/equipment logo I have ever seen.
I always wanted an Octane, but they are still going for insane prices on ebay, and today it really is not worth tinkering with anymore.
What? No "rest of the story"? (Score:2)
However, the article completely failed to acknowledge the stronghold SGI has in scientific 3D molecular visualization and crystallography. Most of those apps are being rewritten for Linux and *BSD, but if you go somewhere like NIH, you'll find a very large population of SGIs. I'd guess the support contr
Re:What? No "rest of the story"? (Score:2)
Re:What? No "rest of the story"? (Score:3, Informative)
Indigo2 (Score:2)
It's also pretty surprising how responsive the thing is - about the only thing I've found so far that can make one of these babies start thrashing is a newer version of Oracle. If I can just sort out this little Ho
Re:Indigo2 (Score:2)
Why not install 6.5.x on it? It runs quite well as long as you can keep yourself from installing everything that seems like it might be useful..
Also, the DHCP client is quite odd, not to mention that if you boot IRIX with a serial console it seems to like to reset things a couple of reboots later,
Re:Indigo2 (Score:2)
Re:Indigo2 (Score:2)
Irix 6.2's DHCP client (Proclaim I believe it's called?) sucks. If you install all of the patches, I believe it will function correctly, but as it installs off the disk, it will happily retreive all of your network setup data and store it in a file in /var/somethingorother, but only set the IP - n
The beginning of the end (Score:3, Insightful)
I was there when SGI lost; the 3dfx story (Score:2, Informative)
It's called NVIDIA (Score:2, Insightful)
Many, many acorns... (Score:2, Informative)
SGI helped grow (accidently - probably by being too short termist) MANY graphics firms. 3dfx had a good number of ex-SGI staff, nVidia has oodles of them, some are at MS working on D3D (when SGI dropped the ball on OpenGL - it didn't keep up the the HW), 3DLabs has a couple but 3DLabs was always a competitor of SGI (and 6000 miles away!). Most famously is ArtX who I _think_ did the GPU for the Gamecube but are now wholey owned by ATi. Many of the ArtX team had worked on the RIP
Jurassic Park (Score:5, Informative)
"This is a Unix system. I know this." - Lex.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeImages/F ilm/JPark/ [monash.edu.au]
Re:Jurassic Park (Score:3, Funny)
Oh the irony!
Linux and OS X killed SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
By 2001, my PIII/500+Voodoo 4+RH 7.3 was smoking the O2's. People with new Athlon+(GeForce||Radeon) systems were putting mine to shame. The new cheap-ass Dell workstations in the computer labs would have been better than the O2's at that point.
Spending that much money on hardware that is obsolete in less than 5 years is not a good investment.
The next year they switched to a Linux/MacOS X setup.
SGI's mid-90s Innovator's Dilemma... (Score:5, Insightful)
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
Anyone Remember the SGI Tractor Trailer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Inside was a collection of workstations all running very impressive (at the time) GL demos with realtime "twist this knob and rotate the champagne glass" kind of stuff.
We have at least three Origin 2000 systems, one is 96 node...so you know the demos must have helped at least some :)
If it wasn't for our Origins running Matlab I probably would not have tried linux until much later. The only reason I tried linux was to use X and run Matlab remotely.
They turned into PS2s (Score:3, Informative)
Titanic (Score:2)
I RTFA... (Score:2)
I had the fortune of visiting the SGI campus this year after LinuxWorld in SF. They have a statue of the pipe logo in the front of the building.... They're keepin' the faith!
-m
Ob. Jurassic Park (Score:3, Funny)
My obligatory Apple-should-have-bought-SGI post (Score:3, Interesting)
Both companies had a solid niche in computer graphics; SGI's in 3D visualization, and Apple's in 2D design. Apple was going to introduce a UNIX based operation system, IRIX is a UNIX based operating system. Both companies are involved in computing, but not so much in the transactional data processing side that HP/IBM/Sun are involved in, and neither one was ever in the position to make meaningful moves in that market. Both had clientelle willing to spend more on their products than the products of their more direct competitors to get either their specialized hardware or software.
I think it would have benefitted Apple by giving their products more industrial/data center credibility, in addition to general upward mobility for hardware and software, especially in the 3D visualization realm. SGI on the other hand would have gotten access to more mainstream applications (in their late 90s heydey you COULD get stuff like Photoshop for the SGI) and easier integration with a desktop-priced computer.
In the end if it was done right, I think you could have had a really cool computing environment based on a common operation system. Research departments or other entities with uniqure requirements could have been "all Apple" with desktop Macs and machine-room servers all sharing the same user interface and capable of running the same applications (think fat binaries with MIPS and PPC, instead of PPC and 68K).
It might have led to some interesting clustering concepts integrating the desktops and the big boys for shared/distributed computing, NUMA, and other stuff.
Anyway, I think there was an interesting business case for such a merger. Most Apple fans (often rudely) disgree, and think of Apple as perpetually a personal computer/consumer electroncis company when I thought they could have been and done more. Oh well, it's too late now.
I Used Many a SGI Machine and Saw The Fall Coming (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used the green boxed machines (their name escapes me), the Iris, the Indy, the O2, and a whole bunch of "oven" machines. All of them very nice to play with but all of which were very expensive. These where the guys who came up with IrisGL which was the forerunner to OpenGL. They went "64-bit" early too although they did it the wrong way (changing the OS moniker to "IRIX64" broke many Makefiles). All was right and good...as long as there was no one else in the same product space.
It was around the mid 90s when several new things started to pop up. Sun and HP noticed how SGI was a "darling" and wanted in on the action and tried to create their own "graphics workstation" both of which weren't as nice and often times a lot cheaper. Around this time, as well know, a little OS known as Linux started to get some steam and a little project known as Mesa started to actually conform to OpenGL.
So now they had pressure from the top and the bottom. I also viewed their buying Cray as a bad move because it didn't make their technology any cheaper to compete against Sun and HP let alone the cheap Windows or Linux workstation with a semi-decent AGP card.
The last SGI machine I saw ran Windows 2K. Such a shame because it was still way overpriced from what you could buy "off the shelf". Maybe things would have been different if they embraced Open Source to cut down the overhead. I honestly don't know. Retreating into the supercomputer product space made me notice how much they were the Amiga/Commedore of the 90s. They were too pretty, too expensive, too early.
I was there (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I was there (Score:5, Interesting)
Their suppot staff were highly trained degreed EEs who actually knew how the comuters worked down to the circuit level
I worked with SGIs from during the '88 - '92 timeframe. At that time, when you called with a problem, you didn't talk to the front-line page-turner monkey like you get now (you know, the guy looking in the same manual we have and saying 'Did you try x?' or 'Did you try y?'). We would actually talk to someone who could solve your problem. I can remember one time we had a problem with 'memmap' and actually talked to 3 people: the guy wrote the memmap function, the guy that wrote the memory device driver, and one other that, IIRC, wrote the semaphore functions.
Talked to all three. At once. Together.
We had a patch the next morning. Two or three weeks later, we got the official distribution.
SGI. How I miss thee...
Re:I was there (Score:3, Insightful)
What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes." Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
I've thought about this
1997 was the critical year in animation (Score:5, Interesting)
Then Microsoft bought Softimage, and made them come out with an NT version. The first serious OpenGL graphics cards (DirectX was stil in the future) came from vendors like Fujitsu and Dynamic Pictures. They didn't work very well. Installation required direct cooperation with the board developers. But they did have the 4x4 matrix multiplier for geometric transforms and a hardware Z buffer, just like an SGI machine.
That's when the studios started gettting NT-based animation systems. They weren't standard desktop PCs at first, though. Intergraph sold "high end NT workstations", and it was worth it simply because they could make the graphics board play nice with the motherboard. Softimage on NT on the DEC Alpha had a following.
One real issue for a few years was that it was seen as "unprofessional" to be using a PC for animation. At one point I had a Pentium Pro in a black rackmount case, and industry people asked me where they could get one like that, so their shop would look "professional".
Then came mainstream motherboards with AGP slots, and finally, the graphics board had enough memory bandwidth to work right. Then serious graphics boards went mainstream, and it was all downhill for Silicon Graphics after that.
SGI Indy vs Cassiopeia PDA (Score:3, Funny)
A few years later, after the SGI had fallen apart and was long since replaced by a far cheaper NT Workstation running the newly ported-to-NT Softimage|3D, I went out and bought a PDA to assist me with my meeting and contact organization.
I was flipping through the technical specs in the manual when I ran across:
Casio Cassiopeia E-100/105 Info
Processor: Mips R4000
ROM CPU: 131 MHz
SGI machines used in an unlikely place (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still overpriced (Score:2, Interesting)
Make sure your monitor supports "sync on green" and an adapter will work. I had trouble with a Sun workstation and adapter with a KDS monitor because Sun uses composite sync and the PC monitor uses seperate H and V sync.
Anyway, last year I noticed SGI stuff going for bargain prices and since it had been a dream machine since 1992 I picked up an Indigo (teal) off ebay for $100, complete with a 19" monitor - shipping was $50, and then picked up a purple Indigo. It's a beautiful deskto
Re:Still overpriced (Score:2)
Typically if you wait long enough, you can find one of these old SGI monitors for sale around your town. They're quite nice: they're rebranded Sony 20" Trinitrons in most cases. Be sure to find one that still has the remote, and if you must buy it off eBay, don't ship UPS! They smashed my first GDM20d11 mon
Re:It was my understanding ... (Score:2)
By the way, did any one else think this same exact article could have been for the amiga instead of sgi? Except for that whole networking with people part... I DON'T want to meet any amiga fanatics. They scar
Re:It was my understanding ... (Score:3, Informative)
They should have used Impressario. Printing & Scanning made easy - only from SGI
Re:Printer Usage... (Score:2)
Have you used CUPS? It's quite easy ot set up a printer - local or network via CUPS. And it has support for literally hundreds of different printers. It's no more difficult to set up printing under Linux than any other platform, provided the drivers are there - and that can be a problem on any platform as well.
American Hot Rod (Score:2)
What a great idea! I wonder what form factor it would accomodate? This reminds me of the show "American Hotrod" on the Discovery channel where they rip the guts out of a 1969 GTO and replace it with modern stuff. Might have to try this myself.
Re:Whatever Happened to SGI? John Walsh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:SGI not gone yet (Score:3, Informative)
Avid is still the standard editor in Hollywood, although FCP [apple.com] has been making major inroads.