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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346 points BirAdam | 1 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | source
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tombert ◴[05 Apr 24 17:07 UTC] No.39944744[source]▶
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.

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1. cameldrv ◴[05 Apr 24 19:17 UTC] No.39946016[source]▶
I used some SGIs in the mid-late nineties, and they did have cool 3D graphics capabilities. I found 4dwm to be kind of cool but mostly gimmicky and it was really slow on the Indy and O2. Windows 95/NT were much snappier on contemporary hardware.

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.