But if the ex-SGI employees that started Nvidia have any sense, they'll stick to the consumer market to ensure no upstart can build an enterprise computing empire off of gamers.
When I went to school for Softimage in 1997 - my favorite thing was building with MetaClay -- I built an amazing Human Figure on an O2 SGI box -- and sadly I lost my dat backup years later - which I would have been able to bring into blender these days....
Too late to edit, but I think the main point stands, the founders and early employees were all from giants with feet of clay who collapsed because they ignored the consumer market.
I agree they effectively ignored the consumer market and died. But it wasn't because they didn't see it coming. It just is, in practice, hard for a billion dollar b2b company to embrace the consumer market even when they recognize it as an existential threat. For more what I mean by that, I wrote an SGI retrospective at:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660
(Sun or SGI might have escaped if they'd merged with then-weak Apple/NeXT, but it's not clear if that would have helped Apple be more successful in hindsight.)
When I went to school for Softimage in 1997 - my favorite thing was building with MetaClay -- I built an amazing Human Figure on an O2 SGI box -- and sadly I lost my dat backup years later - which I would have been able to bring into blender these days....
Metaclay in 1997 was unreal on SGI...
Now its in the Alien that is Free Blender...
(Softimage was[ $25,000 a license at the time](https://i.imgur.com/9gaeeQl.jpeg) - and an [SGI O2 was 15K and an Octane was 47K](https://i.imgur.com/aVQATfV.jpeg)
https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/sgi-hardware-and-sof...
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So after going to school for 3D when it was only taught in 5 schools in the nation at the time - and you can see what a simple rig cost...
I later spent $1,600 on an Evans and Sutherland 32MB Full-Length ATX video card that could handle OpenGL... and run NT and Softimage...