
Silicon Graphics Declares Bankruptcy and Sells Itself For $25 Million - drm237
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/04/01/silicon-graphics-declares-bankruptcy-and-sold-for-25-million/
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iamelgringo
There's probably young-uns here who don't know who Silicon Graphics is or what
they did.

Silicon Graphics sold proprietary unix systems that were very heavily
optimized for doing graphics rendering. Their workstations sold from $10,000
on the low end to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were expensive, but
if you wanted to do real time 3D stuff for animation, visual effects, CAD
applications, or any type of graphics modelling, they were the only game in
town, and you pretty much _had_ to use their boxes.

Their products were amazing in their time, and they pushed the state of the
art in computer graphics hardware for years. But, between the ability to
create relatively cheap linux based render farms with commodity hardware on
the server side, and ATI/NVidia creating great plug in graphics cards for
PC's/Workstations, SGI wasn't able to compete. They slowly died and faded away
into obsolescence. Some of the last remnants of their technology that people
interact with frequently is the OpenGL api.

Silicon Graphics, you will be missed.

~~~
iuguy
They also bought Cray.

~~~
Tamerlin
And sold it for a LOT less than they paid for it. That couldn't have helped
their financial situation any.

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patrickg-zill
SGI killed themselves, just took a long time to die.

They had geniuses working in their graphics side, and when they decided some
15 years ago that "Unix was dead" and WinNT was the future, those geniuses
left for Nvidia and other places. SGI never recovered and ended up reselling
supercomputers with ATI cards in them.

~~~
biohacker42
For what it's worth, MS bought the companies that made a lot of the killer
apps for SGI and ported them to Windows-only.

It wasn't pure suicide, Microsoft helped.

~~~
slackerIII
Which companies/products were those?

~~~
Keyframe
Softimage for example - once they have done the port to WINNT and showed the
world it can be done on that platform they have sold Softimage to AVID - which
recently sold it to, where all good applications die, Autodesk (Microsoft in
shadows)

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known
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library>

~~~
access_denied
Thanks for the link. Can you add some context for why you think this is
relevant ot the topic?

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amitt
the C++ STL library was based off of the header based standard developed at
SGI. So if you've used STL before in C++, you're building off the work that
came out of SGI.

~~~
bd
Oh memories, I remember spending a lot of time here:

<http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl> (SGI's STL documentation)

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jballanc
Damn, SGI is right there with Digital in the category of amazing companies
that brought us amazing advances and didn't deserver the fate that befell
them.

...looks like Sun might be the next member of that club...

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iamwil
I worked there as an intern back in 2000. I did chip circuit verification, and
saw that they had roadmaps for their future products up to around 2006. The
group I was in was designing server chips and their interconnects to make
clusters of high performance super computers.

I recall that they knew Intel was making dual and quadcore chips that would
kill what they were doing, but had no solution how to turn the ship around.

It's too bad. There were some solid engineers there, especially the ones that
came from Cray.

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ComputerGuru
I assume the 25MM value is in the patents and research?

~~~
jwilliams
Not really. It looks like they are carrying a considerably amount of debt
(half a billion). They list their assets at some $100 million below that.

I'd be surprised if a lot of the core patents/IP hasn't already been sold off.

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joshu
Anyone know WHY? What are they paying 600m for?

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access_denied
Giving up IRIX for WinNT? Well. Death to the unbelievers I say. I never forgot
the shock when they had those ads with ther PeeCees in the computer magazines.
Up until that point SGI and SUN where kind of the good guys to me.

Now, how could they have done it differently? I'd say: build up the lead in
gaming consoles and developer workstations they had ad the time. IRIX/MIPS had
also some technical advantages over Linux-Clusters in some niches like
military simulations. They could have become some sort of NVidia in our days.
Does any one has a more qualified strategy / commentary about SGI's demise in
the markets to offer? Thanks.

~~~
sgoraya
SGI clearly had the cutting edge graphics technology and hardware - In my
mind, the 3D video cards killed them very quickly and made SGI obsolete. As
you may recall, when the 3Dfx Voodoo's were hitting the market, SGI did
nothing at all, thinking that they still had the market cornered. Then came
ATI, Creative, Nvidia etc. Back then there was the delineation between
'gaming' video cards and 'workstation' video cards, the latter having the
premium price. SGI could have positioned themselves in both areas, especially
the workstation cards.

It was a classic case of a large, entrenched, slow moving company getting
thwarted by startups. Too slow or unwilling to act / react...

~~~
samlittlewood
It seems a pretty good example of how important talent is vs. the shingle
outside the door.

3dfx was founded by ex. SGI talent - Gary Tarolli, Ross Smith and Scott
Sellers. (Garry Tarolli wrote dogfight)

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zandorg
And Jim Clark 'marries' while ROM burns.

