Pinderkent

Today we finally heard the sad news about what's probably going to be the end of SGI. This doesn't come as a surprise to anyone who follows the industry, of course. SGI's fortunes have been steadily declining for the past decade. But it's still humbling to think of how what was once a great company could fall so far.

The Silicon Graphics of the 1980s and 1990s can perhaps best be compared to Apple today. There was always a certain excitement around SGI's offerings, often due to their quality and power, but also due to their unique flair. This really isn't surprising; they were at the forefront of computer graphics technology. Their systems allowed for the creation of what were, at the time, very spectacular visual effects. Seeing an SGI system at work didn't just leave a strong visual impression of whatever was rendered, however. The unique designs of many of their systems also left an impression.

SGI is best known for their MIPS-based systems, their IRIX operating system, and OpenGL. In terms of hardware, SGI was typically at the forefront of the market. For instance, they offered 64-bit MIPS systems in the early 1990s. This may not seem like much now, but it wasn't until a decade later that we saw the x86 world start to move towards 64-bit computing. And in terms of advanced graphics hardware, they led the way for many years.

Although I didn't work with companies who used SGI workstations for their high-end graphics capabilities, I did use an Indy workstation for some time during the 1990s, and was able to work with some companies who used SGI systems as servers because of their power and flexibility. And as servers, they were always very reliable, and often a pleasure to work with compared to the UNIX-based offerings of various other vendors.

Their IRIX operating system was always interesting to work with. During the time when I worked with such systems, they'd already moved to X and 4Dwm. While I always sort of preferred CDE, 4Dwm nevertheless did provide a unique desktop experience.

Aside from its graphical nature, IRIX was always known for scaling quite well. Given the needs of many of SGI's customers, high performance was always a necessity, and scaling well was typically the only way to get that sort of performance given the hardware of the day. One aspect of IRIX that was particularly interesting was its XFS filesystem. Being a 64-bit journaled filesystem, it was always capable of reliably storing huge amounts of data. While this was necessary for those doing video capture and editing, for instance, it nevertheless proved very useful for others who needed to store huge amounts of non-graphical data. Thankfully, XFS was released as open source software, and has been integrated with the Linux kernel. Even today, fifteen years after it was first released, XFS is still a very usable and practical filesystem, employed by many.

For some time, SGI had many of the brightest minds in the field of computer graphics working for them. OpenGL was one of their notable achievements. Like XFS, they were quite open with OpenGL, and thus it flourished, with it now being well-supported on many modern operating systems and graphics hardware. Just over a week ago the Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL 3.1 specification.

One thing about some SGI workstations is that they had a distinct appearance. Take their O2 and Octane systems, for instance. Both offered curved designs with uniquely powerful color schemes. It was easy to recognize such systems, even from a distance, in much the same was as many of Apple's designs stand out. And for their systems with a less-remarkable appearance, the 3D wire cube logo they used to use always made their systems identifiable.

It's unfortunate to see SGI end like this. Even if their products were expensive, they were typically quite innovative, and were the sort of products that one could get genuinely excited about. Not only did they give their systems a unique appearance, but they followed through and produced systems that were very capable, extremely powerful for the time, and generally quite reliable. Unfortunately, market pressure from below took its toll on SGI. Many of their higher-end customers reportedly moved towards commodity hardware. The loss of talent to companies like NVIDIA and ATI didn't help the situation, either. And although their future may be limited, it's likely that we'll see at least some of their work live on for some time in the form of XFS and OpenGL. Hopefully it's not forgotten where such achievements originated.