The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

Whenever this topic comes up there are always comments saying that SGI was taken by surprise by cheap hardware and if only they had seen it coming they could have prepared for it and managed it.

I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma", which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.

I was making crazy money in the dot-com boom and bought a SGI 540 in 1999 (with an SGI monitor).

With money to burn SGI was a childhood brand, legends in 3D. Such wonderful memories. 15k on a desktop setup - it was loose change, however it shows how clueless I was back then. However I'd felt like I'd "arrived".

SGI with Windows NT - lol - I wrote my first OpenGL game in Visual Basic... I've always been somewhat of an outlier ;-) God help me.

The point? My personal experience says something about the strength of the SGI brand - even in the face of what was happening at the time (3DFX and so on - my previous company was one of the few 3DFX api devs - illustrating how clueless I was...)... it all happened so quickly... I'm not surprised SGI couldn't respond - or more importantly understand the strength of Microsoft/OpenGL/DirectX in the boiling pot of 3DFX / Nvidia and the rest... From memory it took three years and SGI was done - shared memory architecture? No longer worth the cost. :-(

Looking back, I was such a kid - a complete fool.

Greybeard advice: bet on the monopoly. Be smart. Brands like SGI are nothing in the face of install base. Think about how crazy it was to spend 15k on a desktop SGI back then... nostalgia is insanity, vanity.

Yeah but it still sounds really cool!

From 1991 when I first saw SunOS I wanted a SPARCstation. I started college in 1993 and the school was full of DEC Ultrix machines, Suns, HP PA-RISC, and a handful of IBM RS/6000 and SGIs.

I just thought DOS/Windows PCs were such garbage. Single user, no preemptive, multitasking, no memory protection. Then Linux came out and it changed everything. I bought a PC just to run Linux. My dream of a Unix RISC workstation faded away.

My roommate in 1996 bought a DEC Alpha. Not the cheaper Multia but an Alpha that could run OSF/1 Digital Unix. He actually ran NetBSD on it.

In 1997 I took the computer graphics class and we used SGIs. There was just one lab of them reserved for that class and grad students. I was so excited and it was really cool but I didn't think I could ever afford one. It's still really cool though that you had one.