> announcing SGI’s intent to migrate to Itanium (and collaborating on projects Monterey and Trillian) while simultaneously launching an IA-32 series of machines running NT known as the Visual Workstation.
That's pretty wild, I had completely forgotten about that. It was too late of course by then.
I was working at a CAD/CAE the company which leased SGI workstations in the early 2000s. Was just a fresh grad wondering why were they leasing them, then realized they were more expensive than some cars.
Some of the developers were starting to use NT workstation with 3D graphics, they were not cheap, but they could run circles around Octanes and Indigos at a fraction of the cost. They were rushing to port everything to NT as writing had been on the wall for a while by then.