Silicon Graphics was a legendary maker of Unix workstations, founded November 9, 1981. Its Indy and O2 workstations, powered by MIPS RISC microprocessors and SGI’s fabled IRIX operating system, are among the most stylish computers ever made.
SGI specialized in high-performance computing, selling expensive workstations for scientific and high-end graphic use. Its entry-level machines started around $4,000 but could easily scale to $45,000 and even $100,000. It went public in October 1986, the same year as tech giants Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and Sun. By 1988, SGI was selling $150 million worth of computers and services per year.
SGI in the entertainment industry
For a time, SGI was a force in the entertainment industry. Between 1995 and 2002, all of the films nominated for an Academy Award for visual effects used visuals created on SGI computers. Movies utilizing SGI computers included 1989’s Abyss, 1991’s Terminator 2, 1993’s Jurassic Park and its two sequels, 1995’s Toy Story, 1999’s Star Wars Episode 1, 2001’s Shrek, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and others. I’m sure I left at least one of your favorites out.
What killed SGI, in a nutshell
But the momentum of commodity PCs running Linux or FreeBSD was too much for SGI, much like its Unix competitor, Sun Microsystems. SGI didn’t fight any of it. If anything, it joined it, licensing its technology to Nvidia, and sponsoring Linux. The code that SCO sued IBM for including in Linux was actually contributed by SGI, not IBM. SGI’s XFS filesystem was among its contributions to Linux, and XFS is still a popular choice today.
Profits didn’t follow and SGI struggled as the 21st century progressed. SGI’s management has been widely criticized for not getting enough from Nvidia after suing for patent infringement, abandoning IRIX too soon, and undervaluing MIPS, a CPU architecture that was once more widely used than ARM. MIPS CPUs didn’t just scale up to render Hollywood’s newest blockbuster, they scaled down to power the very popular Linksys WRT54G home wireless router and a majority of its competitors.
On May 8, 2006, SGI filed for bankruptcy in order to reorganize. It discontinued IRIX and its MIPS-based workstations as part of the reorg. It emerged October 17, 2006 but its troubles continued. In December 2008, NASDAQ delisted its stock. On April 1, 2009, SGI filed for Chapter 11 again and didn’t re-emerge, instead, selling most of its assets to Rackable Systems for $25 million. Rackable took on the name Silicon Graphics International after the acquisition.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.