SGI being sold to Rackable for $25 million
Silicon Graphics is being sold for $25 million; which is in some ways astonishing for a company that had $4 billion in revenue only 12 years ago – but in other ways no surprise at all. They leapt whole-sale onto the ill-fated Itanium bandwagon and ignored customer cries not to do it. Then they failed to market their excellent software into a world of faster and cheaper Windows and Mac desktops and laptops that quickly surpassed UNIX Workstation performance.
I have many fond memories of Irix, XLV/XVM, XFS, Showcase (still the best damned presentation software on planet), and Performance Co-Pilot visualization. Aside from Showcase, it was all surpassed slowly over time as SGI tried to make Itanium work in a world where cheaper and faster commodity server hardware made Itanium unnecessary. Multi-media handling abilities are still excellent, though running Irix exposed to the internet is a dangerous undertaking these days (too many security holes).
Will someone please buy the IP rights to Showcase and make it available on both Mac and Windows? It shames PowerPoint and Keynote to oblivion even on obsolete hardware and OS… imagine what it could do on a modern laptop…
Likewise, someone could pick up and market Performance Co-Pilot visualization to the rest of the world – that would be interesting. Update: looks like SGI released it! Awesome!
Anyone want to buy two SGI O200 boxes cray-linked into a single 4 processor server with 2GB of ram and a tray of 10 FCAL drives at 10GB each (10,000rpm)? Really cheap!
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