Tuesday, May 09, 2006

End of Silicon Graphics?

As this post on The Register reports the once mighty Silicon Graphics is going under. It's a sorry day for me as they are one of the reasons I got into the broadcast engineering business. In the mid-eighties I was doing a degree in maths and programming and in my final year the faculty took delivery of four Iris 4D25 workstations which were an order of magnitude faster than any other off-the-shelf hardware you could buy. I was hooked - always bugging the network admin to let me in overnight to compile and run code on machines that as well as being fast had TV framestores. From then on (and until I changed jobs in 1999) I've been looking after SG machines. I've owned a couple (although my current Indy is sitting unused under my desk at work!) and have always appreciated their forward looking design. When they absorbed Cray Computer in the late nineties some of Seymour's innovations (like unified memory architecture) showed up in their desktop machines (The O2 and Octane ranges) and at the time we had maybe half a dozen of them at Oasis TV - running everything from Media Illusion to Matadour and Acrobat.
I always felt the end was in sight when they tried to enter the commodity computing market with NT workstations - it's kinda hard to compete with Dell when you're used to selling machine that start at £30k!

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