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Reliving The Glory Days of SGI
devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""
One particular quote I found interesting is, ""In the SGI hobbyist world it's not six degrees of separation, it's three, often less. I recently met one of the industrial light and magic guys who worked on Star Wars: Episode II." I find that this happens all the time in the slightly larger Mac crowd. Easy to pick out the users and get an in-depth conversation started. Once you start you find any and all sorts of wierd and useful connections. Heck, thats mainly how I have the current job I have. Also while travelling overseas the other week I ran into a corporate Apple guy that used to work with my boss. Small world definitely, and being an active part of a small, but active community makes it even more personal.
Glad that there are opportunities for people to keep SGI going. I know I sure have looked at all of those eBay auctions at one time just to see what it was all about. At the current going price on some of the older hardware, I don't see what you have to lose.
The best thing about SG workstations was(is) that they came in funky blue or green boxes rather than beige. And this was years before Apple caught onto the idea and applied it to the iMac.
Oh, they were pretty good at their job, but perhaps that's just a coincidence.
I was at a confernce in orlando last week, and there was a parallel conference which seemed to be mostly military simulation stuff, they seemed to be pretty strong there. Guess they moved to the more lucrative stuff.
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
"This is a Unix system. I know this." - Lex.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeImages/F ilm/JPark/
Here a Sig There a Sig Everywhere a Sig Sig...
SGI faced the innovator's dilemma big-time; it was tricky to cannabalize their $2 billion workstation business for a $300 million graphics card market. And to move from being a full-system vendor to being a graphics card vendor. And even with all the management and business-issue problems, I noticed three problems their engineering effortsg never overcame:
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
> Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself,
;)
Most likely user error.
> and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS
SGI's have a PROM, it's pretty slick.
> password to allow reinstallation
Most SGIs have a jumper to reset the PROM password. It's a FAQ that should take 10 seconds to figure out. It's also in the user manual which if you don't have you can download off of techpubs.sgi.com. You could also have posted on any of the comp.sys.sgi groups and after people flame you for asking a FAQ someone would tell you what to do.
> from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM
> drive we'd spent weeks hunting down.
I've never had a SCSI CD-ROM that wouldn't boot IRIX. Any Toshiba drive will work.
> There turned out to be no way of resetting
> that password, at least not without wiping
> the MAC address too. Given that the machine
> was only useful as an X terminal and web
> browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Sad indeed because all you needed to do was set a jumper.
This is one of the reasons I don't listen to most people's opinions unless it's pretty clear they're experts. It makes more sense to figure it our yourself. Too many times I hear people have immense difficulty or distaste for something and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing. Kinda like the people in infomercials who can't chop an onion or coil up a garden hose or rake leaves.
Or maybe it's more like a Ferrari. Lottery winners will abuse their high performance cars and then complain when something goes wrong ("stupid imported piece of junk!"). In fact this is so common many long-time Ferrari owner's have a name for these type of people: gold-chainers.
To be sure SGI systems have their quirks but most of the negative things you hear about them are not true. I'd encourage people to pick one up and see for themselves but then I don't want to drive up prices
The parent brings up a great point about SGI:
Their suppot staff were highly trained degreed EEs who actually knew how the comuters worked down to the circuit level
I worked with SGIs from during the '88 - '92 timeframe. At that time, when you called with a problem, you didn't talk to the front-line page-turner monkey like you get now (you know, the guy looking in the same manual we have and saying 'Did you try x?' or 'Did you try y?'). We would actually talk to someone who could solve your problem. I can remember one time we had a problem with 'memmap' and actually talked to 3 people: the guy wrote the memmap function, the guy that wrote the memory device driver, and one other that, IIRC, wrote the semaphore functions.
Talked to all three. At once. Together.
We had a patch the next morning. Two or three weeks later, we got the official distribution.
SGI. How I miss thee...
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