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Silicon Graphics To Be Delisted From NYSE
Dan Linder writes "Starting Monday, November 7th, Silicon Graphics will be delisted from the NYSE. The future of the graphics and supercomputing former-heavyweight has never been less certain. This is especially unfortunate given their ongoing commitment to Linux and other open-source projects." From the article: "The company's stock, which once traded at $50 per share, fell below NYSE's minimum standard for continued listing earlier this year. The move comes as little surprise. The company received a warning from the NYSE in May, when its share price dropped below the $1 barrier. Although it had dipped into sub-$1 territory in late 2001 and again in late 2002, the price on both occasions recovered within a month or two. "
They were great machines in the day. It was really easy to grab video with them back 10 years ago when other machines were such a pain to work with. Too bad they couldn't adapt to the changes of the computing world.
why did sgi not do a reverse stock split to avoid delisting? did they want to be delisted?
Can't they list on the NASDAQ? The NASDAQ requirements should be a better fit.
What are the consequences of delisting? Less access to raise capital by issuing new shares? Was that really gonna happen with their current financial situation, anyway?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
From time to time I click on a comment or story link and the page renders strangely. Only noticed it today...
Example here
SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies:
OpenGL - a very important 3D API
The Standard Template Library
VRML which gave rise to X3D Open Inventor which is a C++ wrapper around OpenGL.
Pretty purple boxen that were great in their day.
It seems that these came out years before the average user could really leverage them - years before anyone (including SGI it seems) knew what to do with them.
It seems a shame that such a brilliant company could have such a hard time making money. They made the world a better place though, IMHO.
I heard this at SC a couple of years back:
"There has never been a supercomputing company that the US National Labs couldn't drive out of business"
http://sc05.supercomputing.org/
I no longer need to punish, deceive, or compromise myself. Unless, of course, I want to stay employed.
SGI made some great machines both in the form of the hardware and the looks of the hardware. They also provided us with the likes of OpenGL.
The problem is that the market they once had, being high-end graphics workstations, is being eaten up by cheap MS-Windows based systems. They could try redefining themselves, but I not sure what form it could take. While their version of Unix had some nice additions, it was never really a selling point. Their cheapest systems start off at $9000, which more expensive than Apple, and they also have less technology diversity than a company like IBM to help buffer any slow growth of their hardware. Maybe if they offered a very capable $4000 machine, it might help them attract people who might have never considered them before?
BTW CATIA, which is a very important piece of CAD-CAM software in the automotive and aeronautical industry is actually Windows centric, so they benefits of a SGI machine there is zero.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
AFAICT it is the fact that nVidia graphics cards contain some so-called "intellectual property" claimed to belong to SGI {as if ideas could ever belong to anyone} that is preventing nVidia to release a true open-source driver enabling them to be used to the fullest extent under the popular GNU/Linux operating system and others.
If SGI are bought out, the purchaser might be more keen to release the necessary information. Alternatively, if SGI are wound up, then the information might effectively revert to the public domain by default {since there will be no party in a position to assert a claim over it}.
{Of course, it's also possible that nVidia are using the egregiuous technique of "crippling" a "£200" graphics card by making a slight change to the firmware [so the driver for the £200 card won't work with it] and selling it for £30. If they can make a profit selling the card for £30, then why should they get away with charging £200 for it? An open-source driver would reveal this blatant deception and dog-in-the-mangerism for what it is.}
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
...incompetence ever told. It's astonishing that a company that made the best computers in the world for 3D graphics can have fared so badly in a world where even your cell phone is a computer supporting 3D graphics. They had the world handed to them on a plate and they simply threw their hands in the air, the plate with it. Astonishing. And so depressing. I'd really ike to try to understand how the likes of nvidia took the laurel from them. I remember nvidia's very first '3D' card (you probably never saw it, I helped develop drivers for it many many years ago). It was the biggest pile of crap ever developed. Never in a million years would I guess that a few years later these guys would be blowing away SGI and hiring half of their staff.
you guys were sooooo cool in the 90's, if you'd only get your head out of the sand and realize that people do want cool hardware, and then you actually engineered a laptop worth owning, then i could stop smoking the powerbook crackpipe and return to the hardware vendor i adored .. in the 90's ..
sheesh. you guys. MAKE A LAPTOP DAMNIT.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Apple is in the process of buying them.
A while back, I had to change careers. The bottom fell out of the market for what I was doing before (audio engineering). I was able to take my UNIX skills and pick up a new career where I left off.
About 15 years ago, I was living in Germany working at a post production studio. The graphics department used SGI hardware along with some amazing software. One Friday evening, as I was finishing up and about to go home, someone stuck their head in the control room where I was cutting some ADR for a film (German voices to replace the English). They asked me if I spoke English. Having lived in the US for about 18 years prior to that, I was able to say I was extremely comfortable with the language. Luckily, I also could speak some "tech". SGI's office was closed for the weekend, and they didn't know how to get any other tech support. I sat down with the manual (in English) and fixed the problem with the machine. From then on, I was hooked.
I started learning about all sorts of UNIX-like systems, but SGI is what saved me. When the bottom dropped out of the market, I was able to take my skills in UNIX and experience with SGI systems (albeit in broadcast facilities), and get a job working as a contractor at the NIH on a project where they had about 10 SGI systems ranging from an Origin 3400 to a little O2. I even have an O2 at home on my network there just so I could break it there before I screwed it up at work. =-)
I've been watching this Titanic go down for several years. It has been a long slow death. Now, I hope someone like Apple picks them up and uses their technologies to help better their own products. I'd love to see the Apple Store with a new listing next to the Xserve; the Gserve. 512 POWER5 (yeah yeah...Intel, blah blah) processors, massive disk array, and three steps to get it working:
1. Deploy it in your server room.
2. ????
3. Arrrrrrrrrrgh...I can't do it!!!
Seriously, I'd love to see something like this. It could really help to boost Apple and keep the "legend" of SGI around for a long time to come.
I wonder if I should be scooping up some SGI stock about now so I can sell it to Apple for the buyout. Now, where did I put that crystal ball?
Plant a tree in a developing country.
That's not even funny. Check the dependencies for quake4.exe. It does depend on opengl32.dll. The executable has a lot of references to glXXX functions inside. There are no D3D references or dependencies. Is it enough for you to figure out which API it uses?
I remember when our computer science dept. bought some real expensive SGI boxes. Only a couple people were allowed to use them. They were used for one purpose only; rendering fluid simulations. So, the rest-of-us never really got excited about the hardware.
SGI never got mind share. Even in the 3D world where they had an opportunity. MacOS briefly had a toe hold that was quickly surpased by PCs in the modelling and rendering world. Both were a fraction of the price of the SGI. Suffices to say desktop Wintel owned the market by 1995.
I don't think its fair to say SGI was the Doyenne of computer graphics systems. I don't think any of the players are bitches and SGI was the alpha female...
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
It's still the best place I ever worked.
They never should have given everybody Tag Heuer watches, TJ predicting 50% growth (then hitting 35%), then buying Cray, and then their worst mistake, selling Cray's competing SMP product to Sun which they turned into the E10K. Who made that decision? Ouch.
That is not a single image/kernel machine. It's 20 nodes of 500 processors each! That is to say well within the reach of Irix. It's a huge cluster of slightly less huge super computers!