alt Hacker NewsI was a young systems programmer in this decade, which were some of the most virulent of my life, and I had a lot of projects on Irix, particularly in Mountain View, necessitating my weekly flight from Burbank to San Jose for 3 days on site, porting and hacking and generally having a great ol' Irix time .. and oh, how I loved my trips into the SGI parts of town, the Birds of a Feather meetings discussing Irix vs. Linux (and SunOS and *BSD, oh no!), the flight simulator facility on the SGI campus where I would regularly get trounced by Air cadets in a matter of seconds .. the beautiful buildings that looked like they belonged under my desk or atop the Indy I had at home .. the confident air of the SGI engineers at lunch in the Oracle campus, the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!)
If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like?
Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.
Replies
Fahrenheit was the end, as soon as that was the way forward, nothing happened except engineers went off to work for Nvidia, which nobody at SGI seemed to have a problem with.
You can't change a company that sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K, and the PC was just making the old business model impossible. Apart from anything else, there were some good tools on the PC, albeit MS Office and Adobe Photoshop. The situation was doomed when you didn't need SGI to do decent 3D. They never would have reinvented themselves for this age, sad to say.
I see the alternate reality like so:
SGI creates a low power cpu for Apple to use in portable devices, eventually in desktops and laptops (no Arm).
And either: SGI launches low budget PC with playstation 1 level 3d graphics as soon as they could compete with win3.1/95, running Irix. Or: A few years after that SGI launches what is essentially the Voodoo 2.
Any way you look at it the only possible future for SGI was low cost mass market devices. Just a matter of picking which one, they picked none.