Silicon Graphics (SGI)
More info
- Creator
- Jim Clark et al.
- Released
- 1982–2009
- Type
- Computer manufacturer
- Successor
- Brand bought by Rackable Systems, then HPE (2016)
The dream machines of nineties 3D graphics: purple and teal workstations that rendered Hollywood's dinosaurs and cost about as much as a house.
Jim Clark founded the company around the Geometry Engine, a graphics chip he had designed at Stanford. SGI workstations – Indigo, Indy, Octane, Onyx – ran IRIX, its own flavour of Unix, on MIPS processors, and SGI bought MIPS outright in 1992. That same year it opened up its IRIS GL graphics API as OpenGL, which turned out to be the company's most durable legacy.
Jurassic Park and most nineties film CGI were made on SGI hardware. Then cheap PC graphics cards knocked the legs out from under the whole business model. Buying Cray Research in 1996 didn't help, and in 2009 the company went bankrupt. Its old Mountain View headquarters became the Googleplex.