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346 points BirAdam | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.815s | source | bottom
1. rongenre ◴[] No.39944755[source]
I played with SGI machines in college and they felt like.. the future. I really hoped they would hire me when I graduated.

Incredible, though, how the relatively cheaper Windows NT machines and 3dfx cards and graphics software just killed them. I was a little sad when I wandered around the campus of an employer in Mountain View and noticed the fading sign that had what was left of the SGI logo.

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2. jandrese ◴[] No.39944843[source]
The awesome old cube logo or the new "we spent millions of dollars on a professional marketing department to design a new logo" that is just the initials in a boring font and off center?

I co-oped for SGI onsite in the sales/marketing/support for a major ISP of the day back in the late 90s and the buzz around the office was that the company (at this point experimenting with overpriced Windows NT boxes and generic Linux servers) was experiencing massive brain drain to some brand new startup that was going to make something called a "GeForce" card for cheap PCs that was going to avoid the pitfalls of the then popular Voodoo cards. Apparently the engineers were unhappy with the direction the company was taking under the new leadership and thought that there was still an interest in graphics acceleration.

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3. mrpippy ◴[] No.39944998[source]
The "sgi" logo was a big step down from the cube, but it was a lot more attractive than the Rackable/Silicon Graphics International "sgi" logo that looked like a cheap knockoff of the previous one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International

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4. theideaofcoffee ◴[] No.39945037{3}[source]
It really was a letdown when Rackable resurrected SGI and then brought about that ... thing of a logo. It just felt it hollowed out the brand even more, even if SGI itself was still making some interesting hardware at the time-namely the Altix 4700, UV and ICE, the soul just wasn't there anymore.
5. technothrasher ◴[] No.39945385[source]
> I played with SGI machines in college and they felt like.. the future.

I had a couple of Indigos that I supported while an undergraduate (I had a student job with the University's Unix group in their computing center), and the SGIs felt to me exactly like the Amiga- Really cool, but kind of lopsided. I tended to do most of my work on the SPARCstations and ignore the SGIs unless I specifically wanted to play with the graphics stuff.

I actually still have an Indigo XS24 that I collected at one point over the years. Tried to get it to boot a bit ago but it's dead, unfortunately.

6. nullindividual ◴[] No.39946886[source]
3Dfx didn't play in the SGI space. But Matrox (for 2D), 3Dlabs (another RIP), Orchard (used 3Dlabs chip), STB (again, 3Dlabs chip...), and Diamond (uh... 3Dlabs!).

3Dfx grew up in the arcade market. They were always consumer-focused.

7. rongenre ◴[] No.39948934[source]
The awesome cube, which apparently didn't look good when faxed...