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by guerrilla 139 days ago
Poor SGI. I used to love their website back in the 90s.

It's strange to think that alternative architectures were possible though and could get such a foothold in some industries. The specificity is mind-blowng. Everything is "PC"s today.
3 comments
RajT88 139 days ago
It does blow my mind that back in the 90's that companies were rolling their own silicon and OS's without being absolute giants.
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bdbdbdb 139 days ago
Huh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed they made PCs with their own OS
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dhosek 137 days ago
I remember that SGI was superfast. I did some on-site work for a company that had an SGI workstation and I had installed TeX on it for a typesetting system I’d developed with them. When I ran the TeX process, it was so fast that the screen did not scroll as it ran, instead it just refreshed with the whole multi-line output. At first I thought something had gone wrong because I was used to waiting a few seconds for the code to run on my PC, but it turned out, no, their machines really were that fast.
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guerrilla 138 days ago
Back then there were quite a few competing architectures and UNIXes to go with them. SGI MIPS with Irix, IBM had POWER with AIX and later Linux, DEC had Alpha Tru64 UNIX and VMS (not a UNIX), Sun SPARC with Solaris, HP had HA-RISC with HP-UX. Only SPARC and POWER survived for long and only POWER survived until today as far as I know. Solaris of course lives on in various forms. The old UNIXes I guess mostly do not, being displaced almost entirely by Linux and BSDs.
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dcrazy 138 days ago
IBM apparently still releases updates for AIX on POWER.
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guerrilla 138 days ago
They still build POWER infrastructure too, but as far as I know Linux pretty much dominates. You can even buy POWER workstations from third party vendors like Raptor Computing Systems. Very expensive though.
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cvwright 139 days ago
They made a couple of Intel boxes in the very late 90s / very early 00s, but the company was already on the way out by that point.
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aa-jv 136 days ago
Imagine if they'd made the titanium laptop before Apple, and actually shipped it with Irix .. would have been amazing.
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