I sort of grew up with SGI (Silicon Graphics) computers during my university years and beyond. There was a time, for a span of some 12 years in my academic life, when I had a SGI machine either on my desk, or somewhere close by. Most of my research was done on SGI machines, and data visualized on its fabulous graphics system.
So, today was a sad, sad day for me. With a lot of regret today I read the obituary of SGI. An once mighty Silicon Valley company, with peak sales around 4 billion US dollars, now got sold for a paltry $25 million to Rackable Systems. This is the end of “beautiful computing” as I knew it.
For Silicon Graphics machines were as much work of art as they helped produce. For, do you know, there was a time when the Hollywood dream machine rode fanciful on the able shoulders of SGI. But that was then. Cheap and plentiful hardware and “utility computing” has taken its toll. The sheer power of combined masses of the Intel and AMD, NVidia and ATI, has steamrolled past the fragile beauty of SGI.
I am sure the management of SGI is to be blamed aptly. But I will leave it to others to do that job.
I will only bemoan the beautiful computing machines that have once graced my desktop, and computer rooms, and provided number crunching and graphics horsepower. But, most of all I remember being ecstatic the day I got my brand new SGI Indigo. No, I haven’t felt quite that way with my MacBook Pro, though it comes close at times.
And, no, please don’t even talk to me about the “functionally ugly” IBM PC.
I think the management of SGI could have done little. It is no longer a workstation world. On the bright side, the same forces that destroyed SGI have put computing power in the hands of a lot more people. Let’s hope some of them use it to make beautiful things.
SGI was even more beautiful from the inside. We made dream machines that looked great and brought computing to life. It was serious fun, and we got paid, and for a while made a significant contribution to the advancement of computing as we know it today - check out the history of google earth?
I left the IT industry the day the music died.
The death of SGI (or as we all remember it Silicon Graphics Computer Systems), is symptomatic of the death of computing in general. I always recall the days of the early 90’s, we used to use SGI’s for molecular dynamics (CHARMm), crystallography (Xfit / O) (remember PARALLEL POWER Fortran 77!!!) and molecular graphics (Quanta) on big iron professional IRIS and 4D POWER series systems. Then we upgraded to Crimsons, then Onyxes and Onyx 2’s and finally to Octanes before the cheap nastiness of gnu/linux invaded. I will never forget those days and the way SGI inspired my computing style; the power and expandability of the big racks, the seamlessness of VGX, VGXT and reality engine graphics, wonderful stereo hardware integration (remember Crystal Eyes and PTC), the beauty of writing MIPS R3k assembler routines (one of the simplest chip-sets to code for), who can forget the amazing R8000, the wonderful compilers that SGI produced, and of course using a 200,000 pound machines to play network “flight” games on. If I couldn’t do it with my SGI my mac IIfx could certainly take care of it. Truly works of art as described on this page.
I more or less left acadaemia when SGI disappeared. One thing though; every time they chucked out one of my workstations, I took it home with me. My indigos, onyx, onyx2, challenges, octanes, personal irises, professional irises, crimson, power series, indies, o2’s (great video hardware BTW), indigo 2’s and origin 200’s all still work and see as much service as possible. I am writing this on an Octane R12000 right now as a matter of fact. I may not have the most up to date computing possible (something that the GNU/linux zealots and Apple fanboys (not the practical and sensible users of these systems BTW) seem to insist upon these days), but at least I have beauty and elegance in my computing. I don’t care about modern (read cheap and nasty) things, I don’t care that my power bill is as large as the national debt, at least I am warm in winter! I even find my IIfx (system 7.5 forever) to be usable for most tasks. I find that nothing has offered the power, simplicity and elegance of IRIX; I have tried HP-UX, solaris, AIX, VMS, Tru64 etc and none of them come close in my opinion. The only thing that comes close is learning to write Z80 assembly code on a RM 380Z fitted with dual 8″ drives when I was at primary school.
I can understand what you say about your macbook pro (or Dell in a fancy case). At least you got what you paid for when you bought a PPC or 68k machine, especially if, like myself you love to write assembly code. My (perceived) demise and sell out of Apple is a different rant for a different day. Now I work in the medical profession, as far away from computing as possible but still look back at those days with misty eyes. Who could forget those wonderful machines, or Indizone CD’s for that matter. As described by Hunter S. Thompson: “If you look back with the right kind of eyes, you can see the high water mark where the wave finally broke.” Or something to that effect anyways.