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Rackable Buying SGI Assets For $25M?
UnanimousCoward was one of many people to submit a story that might be an April Fools day joke, except that I don't think it is. Rackable Systems has announced that it is buying SGI for the bargain basement price of $25M. Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation. And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.
Right up until you found out how bad Irix could be ;)...
Very sexy hardware, terrible *nix implementation. I once had (sigh) an IR2 in my office for 6 months. I don't think I slept at home the entire time.
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It's definitely not an April Fools joke. But does this really surprise anyone? They're just going the way of DEC and just about every other Unix vendor. The only ones that are still around and thriving are Sun, IBM, and HP. But those too are slowly dying the old Unix death, done in by Linux I suppose.
:-)
When I was younger, I could have only dreamed of having one of these venerable Unix systems. But now that they're finally cheap and I can afford them, Linux now makes them seem very outdated and proprietary in nature. Kind of a sad thing to see old dreams die, but in this case I think it's also a step forward.
It's always seemed like such a shame to see old well-designed machines built around Unix (rather than just generic PC's) become a thing of the past, though. Good quality hardware and a machine that looked and ran like it meant business, with fast disks and lots of RAM...
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
"Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
My head hurts trying to parse that sentence. Is there some grammatical rule that I don't fully understand or was that just a mistake in the summary?
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The sentence is old-fashioned, but lexically correct. In plainer English it basically means "There was a time when an SGI workstation was really cool and there was little else that was cooler".
"And then I visited Wikipedia
There's also the Nvidia effect. All the old SGI engineers who worked on OpenGL and SGI hardware (Mark Kilgard etc al) all ended up working for Nvidia. Around the time of the geforce1, pretty much every single white paper and tech demo that came out of Nvidia was written by an ex-SGI employee. It was only going to be a matter of time before nvidia overtook SGI, and it's another reason why nvidia's openGL support has always been so strong.
The question is why do empires fall? Usually because they run out of lands to conquer. Or they lose their strategic advantage in technology (transportation, resources).
SGI was cool at the time, but their executive had a fatal flaw - they believed that the marketplace would always be willing to pay premium prices simply for the cool silver SGI badge on the monitor and desktop unit. Back then, anything that connected to a UNIX system would have a UNIX markup price; a UNIX RS232 or monitor cable would cost two or three times as much as a regular PC cable. Just to make sure no-one attempted to use a regular PC cable, an additional pair of pins would be used simply as a loop-back. Other vendors charged site licences by the maximum number of user accounts, the amount of memory, or the number of CPU's in the system.
Even though their engineers could see that PC's were catching up to workstation standards of CPU performance, SGI's executive board refused to develop for the PC platform, as they feared that they would have one half of the company attempting to undercut the profit margins of the other half.
By 1995, Microsoft had brought out Windows NT and other 3D vendors were providing professional graphics accelerator boards supporting texture mapping, SGI's engineers had left to form Nvidia. Then SGI sold all their graphics patents to Microsoft. SGI also bought out part of Cray in an effort to remain in the high-end visualisation market, but as PC clusters keep creeping upwards in performance that didn't work.
If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
SGI bought out part of Cray, the supercomputing/interconnect part. Sun bought out the other part of Cray, the storage systems part. Even if a company is in debt and has no sales, the patent portfolio is worth something even if it is for counter-litigation purposes.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It almost broke my heart when during the remodeling I finally decided to put my old Sun workstation out to pasture - literally, into the backyard, to be picked up by trash folks later. It looked at me with that big monitor, "is that what you do to your elders?". A few years back it was my first Pentium, all SCSIed up and nowhere to go. Then it was my first 386, with extra drives hanging on ribbons out of a half-opened case. Before that it was my XT, along with its sharp yellow Casper monitor. I couldn't bear even to look at it. We spent so much time together. The only thing that remains from those days is my VT220 terminal which I used to log in to work through a modem to work remotely.
I never owned an SGI machine, but I knew people who worked there. SGI was in my back yard, so to speak. We were all so proud or "our" companies and "our" valley. There was no cooler place to live on the planet.
I also remember when Computer Literacy Bookstore closed down. I remember looking into the empty space at North First St. I remember when Kim Vestal's "Get your buns out of bed!" did not ring out in the morning.
Our friends leave us every day. Every time the world gets a little grayer. When it's all colorless, it may be time for us to go.
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