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.

Comments

"little cooler than an SGI workstation..."

[Assmasher]

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.

Surprised?

[plasticsquirrel]

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 But now that they're finally cheap and I can afford them, Linux now makes them seem very outdated and proprietary in nature.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... :-)

Re:The decay of workstations.

[robthebloke]

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.