I was an intern at a CAD company back in the late 90s, and saw how in a short period of time SGI workstations had been replaced by Windows NT machines with better and faster graphics cards.
You could tell SGIs were nice, a good solid build, but their time was over. They were way too expensive. I think we even leased them because buying them was too prohibitive.
But I did have fun discovering by accident the file manager from Jurassic Park ( http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ ) on it. For whatever reason, I remember being really excited about that.
It was a surprisingly fast transition. I was working on physics engines for animation back then. In 1997, I visited Sony Pictures Imageworks in LA, where they had about 90% SGI workstations, 10% NT machines. Two years later, the ratio had reversed.
What killed SGI workstations was the gamer graphics boards caught up with the high end. There used to be a high end graphics market - SGI, Evans and Sutherland, Dynamic Pictures, Fujitsu, Lockheed. It was killed when the low end got good.
SGI might have survived that, but they made a number of bad decisions, including a sale/leaseback real estate deal with Goldman Sachs which locked them into long-term leases at the worst time in the market. SGI tried selling a PC that ran Windows NT, for something like $12,000. I told their sales guy that wasn't going to fly. It didn't.
Most of Google's buildings in Mountain View are old SGI buildings. The Computer Museum was SGI's Digital Studio division, which never accomplished much other than installing networks for some animation studios.
I still remember back in 1999 when an animator at a studio a worked at showed up with a brand new Geforce card he'd just bought. We grabbed one of our NT machines, popped out whatever high end card was in it, put in the Geforce card and started up Maya. Watching Maya run well enough to get real work done on a card that cost a fraction of what a 'real' graphics card cost was pretty amazing. Hell for many of our common work loads there was no real difference in performance at all. Combine that with the recently released Pentium 3 CPUs and you could build yourself 3D graphics workstation out of cheap commodity parts that could really hold its own.
Yep. I have an SGI Indigo downstairs for just that reason. Our Mech. Engineers stopped using them to run Pro E and switched to NT boxes. Couple years later the Indigos were in the trash.
In 2000 I visited a company that designs and produces car parts. They had some SGI workstations running as far as I remember CATIA v4 (3D CAD) with big CRT monitors showing a blue background, and some big tower PCs running WinNT 4 or 2000 with CATIA v5. They told me that the car manufacturer BMW used still the older CATIA v4, so for compatibility reasons they used both software versions.
I was working at a company that bought an SGI Challenge XL (I think for well over $100k). It was between 1-2 years after they bought it that we wanted to upgrade to a faster ethernet interface, but that would cost us around $3000. Instead we spent less than $10k on a Sun clone server with a NetApp filer, a combination that beat the SGI by multiples by almost any measure.
You could tell SGIs were nice, a good solid build, but their time was over. They were way too expensive. I think we even leased them because buying them was too prohibitive.
But I did have fun discovering by accident the file manager from Jurassic Park ( http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ ) on it. For whatever reason, I remember being really excited about that.