SGI to sell itself for just $25m, throw huge sadness party
By Darren Murph 
posted April 2nd 2009 5:06PM
posted April 2nd 2009 5:06PM
posted April 2nd 2009 5:06PM
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Have I mentioned that i love your guys headlines?
They fell asleep at the wheel while Pixar and others stole the show. Bye!
An animation company stole the show from a hardware company?
When considering they had a "head start" in the movie making business, yes, they did.
They didn't have a headstart in the movie making industry....when the article says they helped create those movies, either Engadget is confused, or they are referring to the fact that they sold the hardware platform that other companies (post production companies like ILM and others) used to produce the special effects in movies.
SGI produced kick ass high end graphics workstations with equally kick ass (though hard to use) high end graphics applications. The hardware and apps were very expensive and eventually lost out to cheaper PCs and cheaper apps. (In some cases the same apps that were used on the SGI's, but repriced downward for the PC market.)
So...SGI lost out to the PC industry, not Pixar. Pixar would have been a customer of SGI, not a competitor.
Oh...and they didn't produce the software (made it sound like it in my previous post) it's just that many of the higher end apps used by post houses back then were only available on SGI. Some (most) of those software companies eventually made the move over to the broader PC market.
I loved SGI back then...They were the bomb! You could go to an SGI trade show and it was unfreakingbelievable the stuff you would see that you couldn't see anywhere else. Then the ILM guys would take those off the shelf software apps and tweak the hell out of them to get the amazing stuff you saw in movies.
I used to use SGI hardware about 10 years ago at an animation studio. They came with 256 megs ram, proprietary (of course) video hardware, I think dual-processor Motorola CPU (I forget the speed) and analog video output. "Indigo2", I believe they were called. Apparently, these machines cost $60,000 each -- no joke. High-end hardware, including ram, was very expensive back then, so I guess I can sort of understand the costs. But, about 5 years later, Intels started boosting their power and an equivalent, if not more powerful, Intel example would cost $6,000 - 7,000. But, instead of looking to Intel processors to reduce cost and stay in the market, SGI still used their crappy proprietary Motorola's. It was a few years after Intel's were beginning to dominate that SGI started rolling out Intel-based machines. Too little, too late, still too expensive.
The studio I worked at had at least 200 of these SGI's. And now, they're worthless...
Whats SGI?
You don't belong on here if you haven't an idea of what SGI is.
You group words together to form a sentence.
SGI is the abbreviation for the name of the company mentioned in the article.
... Take tylenol for any headaches, midol for any cramps.
You all get High Rankings for not getting the joke!
Well, for one, SGI did the GPU for Nintendo's N64.
dense.
I can still see their logo floating around in "Lost In Space." Years ago I got a tour of ILM and was shown one of their "4 rooms" each containing 50 SGI machines (of multiple flavors) - I was blown away... 200 SGI machines at one FX company!
I miss that ol' logo - I wonder how much they'd sell its rights for?
OMG RIP SGI
I used to work indirectly for SGI back in their heyday.
Their doom started the moment they decided to build that O2 and then an "advanced" pc line. I was lucky(?) enough to be in on a couple focus group meetings. Everyone in the room all felt that the big failing point of the O2 was the lack of upgradeable graphics. SGI felt that any real professional wouldn't upgrade the graphics only, but would just replace the whole computer. Er... that worked out for them, heh.
Then a bunch of guys bailed to NVidia (some of the tech guys who were on the SGI graphics team)
I can't agree more! I saw the O2 and said, "WTF?" (back then I would have actually said the words). Even I, a non-engineer, could see the massive error of their thinking... I also remember thinking, why don't they just make a kick-ass video card to leverage their name and tech?
I still want their old logo.
@Brian
I share the pain.....I worked on a CG movie for almost 3 years on a crappy O2.
I have a small collection of SGI machines in my garage: a Personal Iris 35TG, an Indigo, Indigo2 and an O2.
Awe, as a nerdy teen I always longed for an SGI O2... I even remember when then were building consumer grade Windows machines. It was the first instance of a widescreen LCD I can remember. Maybe I'm dating myself.
They're all over eBay. This might be your big chance... one of many.
Just make sure you get an R12K or RM5200/RM7000 (yeah, good luck finding a 7000) one.
They left another legacy: The GooglePlex in Mountain View (or at least the 4 original buildings of it) was SGI's newly-built headquarters. When things started going south for SGI, and they sold their fancy digs to the rapidly-growing upstart search company.
I should have just linked to the inevitable Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex .
Heh, yea. The pictures in the Wikki show the buildings with the SGI colors. The Indigo was the color, of well, the Indigo line. And the Purple was the color of the Onyx boxes for a while.
"In order to just terminate the dream before it gets any more nightmarish" I see what you did there.
wasn't 3dfx formed by some ex-SGI guys? i guess 3dfx followed the SGI model too. irony... now nvidia (who swallowed both sgi and 3dfx guys) could follow eventually unless they reinvent themselves.
maybe if we all buy a copy of jurassic park on bluray, we can save SGI with royalties.
I suppose it is too late to buy all those Rare games for SNES that were pre-rendered with SGI gear. :(
Maybe a few Nekochan members could scrape together enough couch cushion change to buy them up?
Imagine going back to SGI's heyday, and telling the board of directors that in 2009, their company would be sold for $25 million.
20 Octane and 3 o2 plugged together can make a time vortex!! it must be 100$ on Ebay now, maybe we should go and tell them after all!
I used do electronic pre-press on an O2 running lineworks Brix. Top end Machines for their day, but even then all the artists in our printshop were switching/learning how to do their jobs on G3's
In regard to displays, the SGI 1600SW LCD held the 'best dot-pitch record' for many many years (until the IBM T221 came out). Mad respect for their forward thinking. I still want a pair just because they're beautiful: http://www.sgi.com/products/legacy/displays.html
Let that be a lesson to all the execs and 'business people': good engineers really run the show. The barometer of the quality of your business decisions is how quickly your engineers file out the door afterward.
yup, those were the displays that hugh jackman used on his nine-headed beast in Swordfish
we had them on all our desks during the dotcom years. they were a thing of beauty.
Going to miss you SGI...
What the heck is a server builder going to do with SGI's technology?! Hummm, I think Rackable is trying to pull a rabbit out of its hat. GOOD LUCK!?
Man, I remember having SGI Workstations in my 3D Animation classes in college (2001-2005)
They were some sweet running macines, and crystal clear LCD monitors gave everyone else a run for their money.
SGI, hopefully your name sticks around a bit longer......
The rest of the world caught up with their great graphics processors. By the late 90s, PC also had 32 bit graphics.
Irix is still my standard in operating systems. Truly sweet. OS X comes the closest as a solid UNIX package with a slick graphical interface ... but Irix seemed slicker. They started my so far 16 year love affair with Unix, and were the reason I installed Linux on my PC in 1997.
SGI, SGI, we hardly knew ye ...
I still have to Octanes in my basement for sentimental reasons. Should I donate them to the Smithsonian now?
ugh. I meant TWO Octanes. It's getting too late to SPEL.
Losers You Had It All but you blew it. No sadness just shame.
I was given 2 SGI Indigo computers when I was 15, lol those things were fun to play with. I remember bringing it to a LAN party once which was ridiculous because the screen had a proprietary connector and was a giant 20 in CRT. I remember finding very old pr0n videos probably from when the machines were in use in the 90s. I always loved the GUI that came with IRIX and I told a girl I had the computers from Jurassic park...she wasn't as impressed as I had hoped. I keep them in my parents basement (I am in college now) and every time I come home she threatens to throw them away LOL. Do you think these will be collectible one day?
That wasn't a proprietary connector. The 13w3 connector was commonly found on workstations from SGI, Sun and IBM. The R, G and B signals were on coaxial connections for good signal quality. We used to run them 100ft without worries of signal degradation. More info on that connector here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB13W3
I have an Indy and an Indigo workstation along with one of the Sony-built SGI 20" CRT monitors. Pretty sweet systems for their day, I still fire them up once in a while. They have some of the coolest looking cases of any PC IMO.
The 13W3 video connector is common, I believe it was first used by Sun on their workstations. Same connector, but Sun and SGI use different pinouts, I found that out when I tried to use a Sun to PC VGA adapter on the SGI, doesn't work.
As far as I can tell, the downfall of SGI was primarily that PCs eventually caught up. SGI had some fantastic innovations, but the same sort of tech started to show up everywhere else, costs plummeted, and tech matured to the point where inexpensive generic PC hardware could do what was previously only possible with high end workstations. It happens all over, I still remember when flatbed scanners started at around $1200 and there were companies that made only scanners. Eventually the tech had matured and cost plummeted and suddenly the market was flooded with sub-$150 scanners that worked just as well.
This is the same company that bought a weary but still kicking Cray Research, chewed them up, and shat them out. Who's laughing now?
After Xerox PARC, then to a degree Evans and Sutherland, SGI's decade, starting in the late 80s, paved the way to modern 3D graphics, image processing and even high volume data management, as we know it today. Their mere failure to introduce a product at a price point that could reach a volume market was the pivotal omission that deterred them from owning the desktop market that no one imagines could have belonged to anyone but Microsoft now.
At the point NT was introduced, it paled in comparison to the mature, multi-threaded hardware accelerated desktop that Irix and its media enabled applications provided. SGI's aversion to the initial losses that would have been required to sell their low volume MIPs architecture at Intel prices, or port Irix to Intel, held the door open for Microsoft to gradually emulate their technologies, and attract, (and buy), their developers. In the end, Microsoft's shrewd marketing devoured SGI. The brief and shining period of SGI's enlightened culture innovated at a breathless pace and inspired developers with a fraternity beyond commerce.
SGI left a legacy of influence and their alumni still guide industry leading products from Nvidia, ATI, Tivo and many others. Someone should write a book about their rise and fall.
SGI was once the hot silicon valley company to work for.... now google sits in the exact same buildings and is currently the hot silicon valley company to work for...
My first hack was a chinese government SGI workstation running Irix. Oh the memories :(
My dad worked for S.G.I, in the late 80's early 90's. It was a lucky day to go to work with dad cause I would get to play on most of the computers, one that seems to come to memory is the Iris, they had a couple of Pixar apps on there built in and a flight simulator. S.G.I threw the best employee party's, I remember one year they "rented out" for the day Great America!
Very sad, but OpenGL lives on. A little something to remember you by. Bye bye SGI.
I remember when SGI was the be-all and end-all in 3D graphics. RIP SGI.
Check out this vintage webserver brochure from my archives dated 1995.
http://bit.ly/ZGPbG