The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

There's a few cases in the history of computers where it feels like the world just "chose wrong". One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time, but for market-force reasons that depress me, Commodore isn't the "Apple" of today.

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.

My main problem with Silicon Graphics (& have the same problem with Sun Microsystems) is that they just tried to do too much in propriety hardware and completely resisted standards. Microsoft & IBM "won" because they made computers with actual upgrade paths and operating systems with wide support among upgrade paths. With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing.

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.

The big exception here is that SGI took IrisGL and made it into OpenGL which as a standard lasted far longer than SGI. And OpenGL played a critical role preventing MSFT from taking over the 3D graphics market with Direct3D.