Silicon Graphics

• 1. A Company Built on Light

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  Silicon Graphics, Inc. began with a single hardware innovation that could render three-dimensional images faster than anything before it. James H. Clark founded the company in November 1981 in Mountain View, California, alongside a group of seven graduate students and research staff he brought out of Stanford University: Kurt Akeley, David J. Brown, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, and Mark Grossman. Clark had recently left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at Stanford, and the technology he carried with him was a chip he and Marc Hannah had designed under ARPA contract.

  That chip, the Geometry Engine, was the first very-large-scale integration implementation of a geometry pipeline. It was capable of approximately 6 million operations per second and handled the mathematical inner-loop computations needed to display 3D images. No general-purpose processor of the era could match it for that specific task. The first commercial machine SGI shipped, a unit from the IRIS 1000 series, went to Carnegie-Mellon University's Electronic Imaging Laboratory in 1984.

  Under CEO Ed McCracken, who took the role in 1984 and held it until 1997, SGI grew from annual revenues of $5.4 million to $3.7 billion. Rivals like IBM and Sun Microsystems largely avoided the high-speed 3D rendering market, leaving SGI to dominate it. That dominance would last until the PC caught up.

• 2. Hollywood and the Visual Effects Years

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  For eight consecutive years, from 1995 through 2002, every film nominated for an Academy Award for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects was created on Silicon Graphics systems. That run was not a coincidence. SGI's MIPS-based workstations of the 1990s ran the company's own UNIX variant, IRIX, and the Onyx visualization systems were large enough to fill a refrigerator, capable of supporting up to 64 processors while managing up to three streams of high-resolution 3D graphics.

  A specific moment stands out: an SGI Crimson system with the fsn three-dimensional file system navigator appeared in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park. The Twister production team built a fake SGI laptop shell around a real SGI Corona LCD flat screen display. The 1995 film Congo shows Laura Linney's character using an SGI laptop to communicate via satellite.

  The entertainment use, though vivid, was never SGI's primary revenue source. In practice, SGI's largest revenue has always come from government and defense applications, energy, and scientific and technical computing. One of the company's largest single sales ever went to the United States Postal Service, whose artificial intelligence program to read, tag, and sort handwritten and block mail at key centers ran on SGI servers. The Hollywood reputation obscured a far more industrial customer base.

• 3. The Geometry of OpenGL

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  In 1992, SGI made a decision that extended the company's influence well past its own lifespan. Its proprietary graphics interface, IRIS GL, had grown unwieldy after years of added features. SGI cleaned up the interface and released it as OpenGL, allowing competitors to license it cheaply and establishing an industry-wide body called the OpenGL Architecture Review Board to maintain the standard.

  OpenGL remained the only real-time 3D graphics standard portable across multiple operating systems for over 20 years, until the Vulkan API arrived. The decision to open it was a calculated trade: SGI sacrificed a competitive moat to become the architect of an ecosystem. That ecosystem outlived the company that created it.

  SGI also contributed the XFS filesystem and the Open64 compiler to the free software community, and was a promoter of Linux and Samba. Its work on the C++ Standard Template Library, released under an MIT-like license as the SGI STL, carried forward directly into STLport and GNU's libstdc++. In 1993, SGI signed a deal with Nintendo to develop the Reality Coprocessor GPU used in the Nintendo 64 console, a partnership made public in August of that year and resulting in a console released in 1996. The RCP was led by engineer Dr. Wei Yen; in 1997, Yen and twenty SGI employees left to found ArtX, which ATI Technologies acquired in 2000.

• 4. Acquisitions and Overreach

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  SGI's growth years were marked by aggressive acquisitions that expanded its reach and later strained its finances. In 1992, SGI acquired the MIPS company itself for $333 million to secure its supply of 64-bit processors and renamed it MIPS Technologies Inc. In 1995, it purchased Alias Research, Kroyer Films, and Wavefront Technologies for approximately $500 million combined, merging them into Alias|Wavefront. In February 1996, it bought Cray Research, the legendary supercomputer maker, for $740 million, only to sell the Cray Business Systems Division to Sun Microsystems three months later.

  SGI sold the Cray brand and product lines to Tera Computer Company on the 31st of March 2000, for $35 million plus one million shares. In June 2004, it sold the Alias|Wavefront business to private equity firm Accel-KKR for $57.5 million. Autodesk then acquired Alias for $182 million in October 2005. Each sale represented a fraction of what SGI had originally paid.

  In September 2000, SGI acquired the Zx10 series of Windows workstations from Intergraph Computer Systems and rebadged them as SGI products. That line was discontinued in June 2001. SGI also built the supercomputer Columbia for NASA Ames Research Center in October 2004, a cluster of 20 Altix supercomputers each with 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors. It achieved 42.7 teraflops of sustained speed, breaking the previous world record held by Japan's Earth Simulator at 35.86 teraflops.

• 5. The Itanium Miscalculation

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  In 1998, SGI announced it would abandon its own MIPS processors for Intel's forthcoming Itanium chip, code-named Merced. The decision reflected a broad industry expectation that Itanium would replace both CISC and RISC architectures in non-embedded computing. SGI reduced funding for its own high-end processors and planned for the R10000 to be the last mainstream MIPS chip.

  Itanium's production delays became apparent as early as 1999. SGI responded by extending the R10000 design into stopgap variants: the R12000, R14000, and R16000, used in MIPS servers and workstations from 1999 through 2006. SGI's first Itanium system, the SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001. The Itanium 2-based Altix servers eventually replaced the MIPS-based Origin product line in the server market, but the transition in the workstation market was never completed.

  The premature public announcement of the MIPS-to-Itanium migration, combined with failed ventures into IA-32 architecture under the Visual Workstation brand and the acquired Intergraph Zx10 range, damaged SGI's credibility with its existing customers. The Visual Workstations ran Windows NT and placed SGI in direct competition with Dell, removing any justification for a price premium. The product line was abandoned a few years after launch. In November 2005, SGI was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after its stock fell below the minimum share price. Its market capitalization had dropped from a peak of over seven billion dollars in 1995 to just $120 million at delisting.

• 6. Bankruptcy and What Remained

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  On the 8th of May 2006, SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, aiming to reduce debt by $250 million. The court approved a $70 million financing facility from bondholders two days later. SGI emerged from that bankruptcy on the 17th of October 2006, issuing new stock on NASDAQ under the symbol SGIC while the previous common stockholders were left with worthless shares. At year's end, the company moved its headquarters from Mountain View to Sunnyvale; its former Amphitheatre Parkway campus had already been leased to Google in 2003 and was sold to them outright in 2006.

  On the 1st of April 2009, SGI filed for Chapter 11 again and announced it would sell substantially all its assets to Rackable Systems for $25 million. The final sale price was $42.5 million, finalized on the 11th of May 2009. Rackable then assumed the name Silicon Graphics International as its global brand. The remnant of Silicon Graphics, Inc. became Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc., which pursued patent litigation against AMD and Apple involving graphics-related patents including U.S. Patent No. 6,650,327. Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Silicon Graphics International in November 2016, adding the SGI Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center to HPE's portfolio.

  SGI's former North Shoreline headquarters in Mountain View is now occupied by the Computer History Museum. Both the Shoreline and Amphitheatre Parkway buildings were award-winning designs by Studios Architecture.