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Silicon Graphics Dead

Silicon Graphics
KindCompany
Founded1981
Defunct2009
StatusDead
FoundersJim Clark
FieldWorkstations
Also known asSGI
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

Geometry engines to Hollywood — IRIX, OpenGL, Indigo, Indy. Commodity graphics gutted it; Chapter 11 in 2009, the name sold to the rackmount buyer.

Created IRIX SGI Indy
Acquisitions Cray Research

Clark's Stanford geometry-engine research became SGI (1981), whose IRIS workstations defined 3D graphics — Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Nintendo 64's custom Reality chip — and whose OpenGL became the industry standard.

Commodity GPUs and Linux ate the business. It merged with bankrupt Cray Research in 1996, filed Chapter 11 in 2006, and sold to Rackable in 2009 — which kept the name 'SGI' for itself.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/sgi/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics