Short answers, pulled from the story.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was an American high-performance computing manufacturer specializing in 3D graphics workstations and servers. The company was known for the Geometry Engine chip, which accelerated geometric computations for 3D imaging, and for dominating the visual effects market from 1995 through 2002, when every Academy Award nominee for visual effects was made on SGI systems.
James H. Clark founded Silicon Graphics in November 1981 in Mountain View, California. He left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at Stanford University and started the company with seven graduate students and research staff, including Kurt Akeley, Marc Hannah, and Tom Davis.
SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice, first in May 2006 and again in April 2009. The company's decline stemmed from several failures: the rise of inexpensive Linux-based PCs that matched SGI's 3D capabilities, a damaging premature announcement of its shift from MIPS to Itanium processors, unsuccessful ventures into Windows NT workstations, and the porting of Maya to other platforms, which eroded the low end of SGI's product line.
OpenGL is the foundational cross-platform API for real-time 3D graphics. Silicon Graphics created it in 1992 by reforming its proprietary IRIS GL interface, then allowed competitors to license it cheaply and established the OpenGL Architecture Review Board to govern the standard. OpenGL remained the only portable real-time 3D graphics standard for over 20 years until Vulkan appeared.
SGI sold substantially all of its assets to Rackable Systems for $42.5 million, finalized on the 11th of May 2009. Rackable assumed the name Silicon Graphics International. The remaining corporate entity became Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. and pursued patent litigation. Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Silicon Graphics International in November 2016.
In early 1993, Silicon Graphics signed a deal with Nintendo to develop the Reality Coprocessor GPU used in the Nintendo 64 console. The deal was made public in August 1993, and the console launched in 1996. The RCP was developed by SGI's Nintendo Operations department, led by engineer Dr. Wei Yen.