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.

If Amiga really "deserved" to win, I think they wouldn't have been eclipsed by the PC ecosystem in terms of performance.

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.