Comment by guerrilla
12 hours 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.
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.
Huh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed they made PCs with their own OS
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.
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.