The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers.

Irix was a really cool OS, and 4Dwm was pretty nice to use and play with. It makes me sad that they beaten by Apple.

I think it's a combination of a skillset/culture needed to create a paradigm shift isn't the same one needed to compete with others on a playing field you built, and of complacency. It happens over an over. We saw it happen with RIM, and we're watching it happen right now with Prusa Research.

I think you highlighted very correctly there, though, why SGI lost. It turned out there were cheaper options, which while not on par with SGI workstations initially, just improved at a faster rate than SGI and eventually ended up with a much better cost/functionality profile. I feel like SGI just bet wrong. The article talks about how they acquired Cray, which were originally these awesome supercomputers. But it turned out supercomputers essentially got replaced by giant networks of much lower cost PCs.

Along the same lines, there is an alternate timeline where the Sharp X68000 took over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OepeiBF5Jnk

See the dominance of Threadripper in workstations, which is built on top of mainstream desktop and server parts bin. Or look at the Epyc based supercomputers, rumored to be the only supercomputers to turn a net profit for the suppliers, thanks to leveraging a lot of existing IP.

I guess it's just kind of impossible to predict the future. I don't think it's an incompetent decision to try and focus entirely on the workstation world; there are lots of businesses that make no attempt to market to consumers, and only market to large companies/organizations, since the way budgeting works with big companies is sort of categorically different than consumer budgets.

But you're absolutely right. Apple and Windows computers just kept getting better and better, faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, as did 3D modeling and video editing software for them. I mean, hell, as a 12 year old kid in 2003, I had both Lightwave 3D (student license) and Screenblast Movie Studio (now Vegas) running on my cheap, low-spec desktop computer, and it was running fast enough to be useful (at least for standard definition).

In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems.

One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.

They leapt out ahead of the competition with an advanced OS, purpose-built for graphics and sound in a way that PCs and Macs weren't.

Which was great. But they weren't really better than the competition. They were just doing something the competition wasn't. And when the competition actually started doing those things they got eclipsed in a hurry.

I wonder if Tesla will suffer the same fate. They were obviously around a decade ahead of the established players when it came to electric cars. But once the other established players actually got serious about electric cars, Tesla largely stopped being special, and upstarts like Lucid and Rivian are neck and neck with them (in terms of compelling products, not sales) as well.

Yeah, I think that would also have been a better timeline; I'm just stuck in the anglo-world and thus my knowledge is mostly limited to what was released in the US or Europe.

At the time. A brief moment in time, and then they had no path forward and were rapidly steamrolled. Nothing was "chosen wrong" in this aspect.

What smaller businesses are using will tend to be what takes over in the future, just due to natural processes. When smaller businesses grow, they would generally prefer to fund the concurrent growth of existing vendors that they like using than they are to switch to the existing "industrial-grade" vendor.

At the same time, larger organizations that can afford to start with the industrial-grade vendors are only as loyal as they are locked in.

Amiga was only better 1985-1988.

I still have my original Amiga and A2000. I was an Amiga user for a decade. They were very good. I was platform agnostic, caring only to get work done as quickly and easily as possible so I was also an early Macintosh user as well as Sun and PA-RISC. And yes, I still have all of those dinosaurs too.

By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back.

But by 1988 the PS/2 with a 386 and VGA was out and the A2000 was shipping with a 7MHz 68000 and ECS.

By 1990 the 486s were on the market and Macs were shipping with faster 030s and could be equipped with NuBUS graphics cards that made Amiga graphics modes look like decelerated CGA.

After the A2000 the writing was on the wall.

Note: my perspective is of someone who has always used computers to do work, with ALMOST no care for video games so all of the blitter magic of Amiga was irrelevant to me. That being said when DOOM came out I bought a PC and rarely used my Amigas again.

What I can confidently assert is that I upgraded my A2000 many times and ran into the absolute configuration nightmare that is the Amiga architecture and the problems with grafting upgrades onto a complex system with multiple tiers of RAM and close OS integration with custom chips.

One more bit of heresy is that I always considered Sun's platform to be superior to SGI's.

As much as I loved my O2 (my first professional computer), it was underpowered for the time for anything other than texture manipulation. The closed source nature of that time period and the hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers on top of already very expensive hardware. The Cray-linked Origin 200's ran Netscape web server with ease but that's a lot of hardware in a time period when everything went out of date very quickly-donated ours! Irix still looks better than the new Mac OS UIs IMO but no-Motif is a small price to pay for far cheaper access to SDKs IMO. Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature. https://insecure.org/sploits_irix.html

This means there are products out there with futuristic features that will be seen as requirements for all things going forward and right now those features are niche elements of some product.

The Amiga was a fantastic device but not a general purpose device. Lots of things are fantastic at a niche but not general, and those almost always fail.

Is this also the "worse is better" truism?

I think a more useful explanation is that people rate the value of avoiding vendor lockin extraordinarily high, to the extent that people will happily pick worse technology if there's at least two competing vendors to choose from. The IBM PCs were not good, but for convoluted legal reasons related to screwups by IBM their tech became a competitive ecosystem. Bad for IBM, good for everyone else. Their competitors did not make that "mistake" and so became less preferred.

Microsoft won for a while despite being single vendor because the alternative was UNIX, which was at least sorta multi-vendor at the OS level, except that portability between UNIXen was ropey at best in the 90s and of course you traded software lockin for hardware lockin; not really an improvement. Combined with the much more expensive hardware, lack of gaming and terrible UI toolkits (of which Microsoft was the undisputed master in the 90s) and then later Linux, and that was goodbye to them.

Of course after a decade of the Windows monopoly everyone was looking for a way out and settled on abusing an interactive document format, as it was the nearest thing lying around that was a non-Microsoft specific way to display UI. And browsers were also a competitive ecosystem so a double win. HTML based UIs totally sucked for the end users, but .... multi-vendor is worth more than nice UI, so, it wins.

See also how Android wiped out every other mobile OS except iOS (nobody cares much about lockin for mobile apps, the value of them is just not high enough).

There's other stuff too; they had better color graphics in the 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware. Even by 1990, the video toaster was released, well before it got any port to DOS.

[1] I'm sure it got better, my first exposure to it was System 7 and that thing was an unholy mess. I didn't touch macOS again until OS X.

Oh indubitably! I don't think even the most committed Amiga fan, even the ones that speculate about alternate histories, would deny that at all.

The thing is, though, that only happened because Commodore essentially decided that since it had so much of a head start, it could just rest on its laurels and not really innovate or improve anything substantially, instead of constantly pushing forward like all of its competitors would do, and so eventually the linear or even exponential curve of other hardware manufacturers' improvements outpaced its essentially flat improvement curve. So it doesn't seem like IBM PCs and eventually even Macs outpacing the power of Amiga Hardware was inevitable or inherent from the start.

If they had instead continued to push their lead — actually stuck with the advanced Amiga chips that they were working on before it was canceled and replaced with ECS for instance — I certainly see the possibility of them keeping up with other hardware, and eventually transitioning to 3D acceleration chips instead of 2D acceleration chips when that happened in the console world, eventually perhaps even leading to the Amiga line being the first workstation line to have the gpus, and further cementing their lead, while maintaining everything that made Amiga great.

Speculating even further, as we are seeing currently with the Apple M-series having a computer architecture that is composed of a ton of custom made special purpose chips is actually an extremely effective way of doing things; what if Amiga still existed in this day and age and had a head start in that direction, a platform with a history of being extremely open and well documented and extensible being the first to do this kind of architecture, instead of it being Apple?

Of course there may have been fundamental technical flaws with the Amiga approach that made it unable to keep up with other hardware even if Commodore had had the will; I have seen some decent arguments to that effect, namely that since it was using custom vendor-specific hardware instead of commodity hardware that was used by everyone, they couldn't take advantage of the cross-vendor compatibility like IBM PCs, could and also couldn't take advantage of economies of scale like Intel could, but who knows!

When these RISC-based workstations were initially released their performance, especially at graphics, was well beyond what a PC could do, and justified their high prices. A "workstation" was in a class by itself, and helped establish the RISC mystique.

However, eventually Intel caught up with the performance, at a lower price, and that was pretty much the end. Sun lived on for a while based on their OS and software ecosystem, but eventually that was not enough especially with the advent of Linux, GCC, etc, as a free alternative.

How is that in anyway different from Apple today with it's ARM SoCs, soldered SSDs and an OS that requires "entitlements" from Apple to "unlock" features and develop on?

But I think you're broadly right.

[1] Yes I know about OpenFOAM, I know I could use that if I really wanted.

So in 20 years in, the current batch of senior devs will be retiring, and the current noobies will have become senior devs.

*Whatever language is easy to learn today will be a big deal in 20 years*

That's how PHP, Python, and JavaScript won. Since JavaScript got so much money poured on it to make it fast, secure, easy, with a big ecosystem, I say JS (or at least TS) will still be a big deal in 20 years.

The latest batch of languages know this, and that's why there are no big minimal languages. Rust comes with a good package manager, unit tester, linter, self-updater, etc., because a language with friction for noobies will simply die off.

One might ask how we got stuck with the languages of script kiddies and custom animated mouse cursors for websites. There's no other way it could turn out, that's just how people learn languages.

For Fortran? My memory is hazy but at NASA NAS a bunch of us were using gcc/g++ starting ~1990. g++ was... an adventure. Building my own (fine!) compiler for free(!) got me hooked on OSS to the point that when Linux/FreeBSD launched I jumped in as fast as I could.

I really loved my various SGI boxen. Magical times. I was a NASA "manager" so had the Macintosh "manager" interface box that I solved by keeping it turned off.

There was a window in the mid-90s where it would have been possible for SGI to develop a PC 3D accelerator for the consumer market using their GE technology, but nobody in the C-Suite had the stomach to make a new product that would undercut the enormous profit margins on their core product. It's the classic corporate trap. Missing out on the next big thing because you can't see past next quarter's numbers. Imagine basically an N64 on a PCI card for $150 in 1996. The launch versions could be bundled with a fully accelerated version of Quake. The market would have exploded.

In 91 I was a dedicated Atari ST user convinced of the superiority of the 68k architecture, running a UUCP node off my hacked up ST. By the end of 92 I had a grey-box 486 running early releases of Linux and that was that. I used to fantasize over the photos and screenshots of workstations in the pages of UnixWorld and similar magazines... But then I could just dress my cheap 486 up to act like one and it was great.

> 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware.

And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting?

> Even by 1990, the video toaster was released,

And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform.

Also, I don't buy into the idea that just because a company had something "superior" for a short period of time with no further company direction that they didn't lose fair and square. That Amiga had something cool in the 80s but didn't or couldn't evolve isn't because the market "chose wrong". Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run. Suffering a few more years with the occasional bomb on System 7 was not a market failure.

> Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking

What was bizarre about it, compared to any other cooperative multitasking system of the time? Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.

Absolutely, they could have been where Nvidia is now!

That was in addition to having three default accounts with well known passwords and a telnet server.

One day ...

I'm on board for this project?

The Saturn 5 was clearly a technical marvel better than any plane, and it'd get you anywhere much faster.

If you spare no expense, you get a better product. Sure. I'm also not surprised that a $100k BMW is more comfortable than a Renault Clio.

My first PC was acquired in 1992, and still only had a lousy beeper, on a 386SX.

It hardly matters nowadays for most game developers.

There were times when Java ran better on Intel than on Solaris.

I don’t know anyone at Rivian so my opinion of them is neutral. Meanwhile Tesla is run by the jackass who ruined twitter.

In my opinion, Mesa played a more significant role because it first allowed people to port OpenGL software to run on software-only cheap systems running Linux, and later provided the framework for full OpenGL implementations coupled with hardware acceleration.

Of course, I still greatly enjoyed running Quake on Windows on my 3dfx card with OpenGL.

What happened was Intel, they took great decisions like automating the design of their processors and this made them grow at an incredible pace. The Amiga depended on a different processor that stagnated.

Chip ram, fast ram, cpu ram, expansion board ram, or slow ram? Did too much ram force your zorro card into the slooooooooooow ram address space (mine did)? Tough cookies bucko!

Macintosh, pounding on table: "RAM is RAM!"

Yeah fair. I do wonder if a port like the SNES version would have been possible if id would have greenlit it, but that's a "what if" universe. Alien Breed 3D would run on a 1200, but IIRC it ran pretty poorly on that.

> And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting?

I mean, yes, VGA cards and Soundblaster cards were around in 1990, but they weren't really standard for several years later.

> And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform.

Also fair. I'll acknowledge my view is a bit myopic, since I don't really do CAD or desktop publishing, but I do some occasional video editing, and I do think Amigas were quite impressive on that front. You're right in saying it was a "niche" though.

> Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run.

No argument here. Still think that the hardware was pretty cool though.

> What was bizarre about it

I guess "bizarre" was the wrong word. It was just really really unstable, and System 7 would constantly freeze for seemingly no reason and I hated it.

> Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.

I feel like if Commodore had been competently run, they could have done work to get proper protected memory support, but again that's of course a "what if" universe that we can't really know for sure.

I guess what frustrates me is that it did genuinely feel like Commodore was really ahead of the curve. I think the fact that they had something pretty advanced like preemptive multitasking (edit: fixed typo) in the mid 80s was a solid core to build on, and I do kind of wish it had caught on and iterated. I see no reason why the Amiga couldn't have eventually gotten decent CAD and Desktop publishing software. I think Commodore didn't think they had to keep growing.

This is I think the premise that you and people like me who think Amiga could have gone on to do great things disagree on, I think. Most Amiga fans would say that it totally had a path forward, or at least there is no evidence that it didn't, and the failure to follow that path therefore it wasn't an inherent technical problem, but a problem of politics and management. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

Sun Microsystems was a company like no other. The last of a dying breed of "family" technology companies.

[1] http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html

By the early 90's the Amiga just wasn't competitive. The chip set barely evolved since 1985. ECS barely added anything over the original chip set. By around 1992 or 1993, 386 systems with SVGA and Soundblaster cards were cheap. Amiga AGA was too little, too late. Also consider the low end AGA system (Amiga 1200) was totally crippled with only 2 megs of slow "chip" RAM.

I was an Amiga fan until 1993. Started with an A500, then A3000. Eventually I moved on to a 486 clone w/Linux. Later on I had a Sun SparcStation 10 at home, so I agree with you on Sun and SGI.

But the reality is the Commodore 64 kept Commodore going during most of that period rather than Amiga sales. It's similar to Apple where the Apple 2 kept Apple afloat during the 80s and 90s until Steve returned.

By '97 or so SGI actually had essentially given up competing when they shut down the team that was developing the successor to InfiniteReality.

In a sense though, Silicon Graphics did become more standard, in that their original 3D framework was Iris GL, which then evolved into OpenGL, which became the main 3D graphics standard for many years.

Interesting. How cheap? Never used Macs, only Windows and Unix and Linux.

By the late 80s the "microcomputer" hobby/games market was dead and systems like the ST and Amiga (or Acorn Archimedes, etc.) were anachronisms. You had to be a PC-compat or a Mac or a Unix workstation or you were dead. Commodore and Atari both tried to push themselves into that workstation tier by selling cheaper 68030 machines than Sun, etc, but without success.

My take: that’s just fine. Tightly crafted code is not a lost art, and is in fact getting easier to write these days. You’re just not forced into scrabbling for every last byte and cpu cycle anymore just to get acceptable results.

I used it for a while earlier at work, and don't remember many problems with it. One did have to apply OS patches fairly regularly to it, but IIRC, that process was somewhat smooth.

Regarding Windows, some time reading the excellent Windows Internals book series is recommended.

And if memory serves, the Bible (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603263.Advanced_Programm...) didn’t cover it, which was a problem.

There is no way to do this for an IBM z16, which is the kind of vendor lock in that people are saying Apple doesn’t have.

When you switched to Intel in 1992, PC's had already existed since 1981. PC's didn't wipe out most other home computers overnight.

Worked at a university in the early 90s.

Maybe irix was okay to use if you were just sitting in front of it doing rando user / graphics things, but administering it was unbearable. The license fees to get OS updates were exorbitant; you'd have to get wacky new licenses to enable NFS or NIS and you'd need new kernels for just about anything.

As far as I could tell they were a cursed company that hated their users. "Here's a pretty thing that does one thing well but is otherwise insane and will ruin you when you need it most."

Good riddance.

The Fibre Channel XIO boards were really needed back then for that application as PCI was still way too slow.

I was sad to know that when I left that job that SGI server was being replaced and the support personal at SGI were going to lose their jobs too.

Oracle threatened to not support us when I used an unprivileged Xvfb instqance instead.

Still stupid but not that uncommon back then.

The company was going to shit after the Amiga launched, it took a competent manager to save the company and turn the Amiga around into a moderate success.

Commodore didn't really have money to keep up chip development. They had their fab they would have need to upgrade that as well, or drop it somehow.

Another example of that is the Acorn Archimedes. Absolutely fucking incredibly hardware for the price. Like crushing everything in price vs performance. But ... literally launched with a de-novo operating system with 0 applications. And its was a small company in Britain.

The dream scenario is for Sun to realize that they should build a low cost all costume chip device. They had the margin on the higher end business to support such a development for 2-3 generations and to get most software ported to it. They also had the software skill to make the hardware/software in a way that would allow future upgrades.

I don't know what Sun had planned for this tech.

A even more interesting approach for Sun would have been to cooperate or acquire Acorn. The Acorn Archimedes was an almost perfect low end work station product. Its incredible weakness was its lack of OS and it total lack of applications.

Acorn spend an absolutely absurd amount of money to try to get the OS and application on the platform. They spend 3 years developing an new OS, and then realized that this was going nowhere. So they rushed out another new OS. And then they realized that nobody want to buy a machine with a compromise OS and no application. So they had to put up huge effort to try to fix that. The company simply couldn't sustain that kind of effort on the Software side while at the same time building new processors and new machines. Its surprising what they achieved but it wasn't a good strategy.

Had they just adopted SunOS (BSD) it would have been infinitely better for them. And for Sun to release new high and and low end RISC workstations at the same time would have been an absolute bomb in the market.

Even if you added all the bells and whistles to the system (Ethernet, SCSI, extra RAM), you could be very low priced and absolutely blow pretty much every other system out of the water.

Re Acorn though — As much better from a market perspective as buying Acorn and releasing RISC- and BSD-based low-end workstations might have been for Sun, I still prefer to imagine a world where the Amiga's unique hardware and software got to live on — perhaps with compatibility layers to run Sun software, but nevertheless preserving a UNIX-like but still non-UNIX OS lineage and non-generic-PC hardware lineage.

I'm less clear on whether or not he's a net minus. I don't know if his detractors outnumber his fans or vice-versa.

The feature here is that AmigaOS will try and reuse the ExecBase structure if found.

Such structure has a checksum, which is checked. If the check fails, a new one is made. This happens e.g. on power on, or after running games that are not system friendly (i.e. most games).

But if the check passes, this structure has important information, such as a list of memory regions, the "cold/cool/warm" vectors, which are function addresses that get called if non-zero at different points of the boot process (non-surprisingly a virus favorite), as well as and a list of reset-resident modules, which become allocated memory, thus protecting them.

A popular such device implements a reset-resident memory-backed block device, which the Amiga is able to boot from.