There's probably young-uns here who don't know who Silicon Graphics is or what they did.
Silicon Graphics sold proprietary unix systems that were very heavily optimized for doing graphics rendering. Their workstations sold from $10,000 on the low end to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were expensive, but if you wanted to do real time 3D stuff for animation, visual effects, CAD applications, or any type of graphics modelling, they were the only game in town, and you pretty much had to use their boxes.
Their products were amazing in their time, and they pushed the state of the art in computer graphics hardware for years. But, between the ability to create relatively cheap linux based render farms with commodity hardware on the server side, and ATI/NVidia creating great plug in graphics cards for PC's/Workstations, SGI wasn't able to compete. They slowly died and faded away into obsolescence. Some of the last remnants of their technology that people interact with frequently is the OpenGL api.
I spent most of grad school with one Octane on top of my desk (my primary machine) and a second one under my desk. Beautifully engineered, rock solid and great for their time. But SGI's steps post about 1998 were just crazy. Windows boxes with no software, a failure to realize how powerful linux systems were going to get, and losing their OpenGL team to NVidia.
Further tying the past to the present, Google now inhabits the offices that SGI had to leave behind as their business declined. As far as I can tell, Google kept the old building numbers, too, which explains why the first building Google moved into were numbered in the forties.
Silicon Graphics sold proprietary unix systems that were very heavily optimized for doing graphics rendering. Their workstations sold from $10,000 on the low end to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were expensive, but if you wanted to do real time 3D stuff for animation, visual effects, CAD applications, or any type of graphics modelling, they were the only game in town, and you pretty much had to use their boxes.
Their products were amazing in their time, and they pushed the state of the art in computer graphics hardware for years. But, between the ability to create relatively cheap linux based render farms with commodity hardware on the server side, and ATI/NVidia creating great plug in graphics cards for PC's/Workstations, SGI wasn't able to compete. They slowly died and faded away into obsolescence. Some of the last remnants of their technology that people interact with frequently is the OpenGL api.
Silicon Graphics, you will be missed.