9 Nov
2005
9 Nov
'05
8:17 p.m.
Zane H. Healy wrote:
At 2:02 PM +0000 11/9/05, Jules Richardson wrote:
Pretty much all of their stuff is impressive! (barring the last handful
of years). Very good quality, and some pretty slick software too...
Lack of responses to this probably indicates
peoples' feelings toward
SGI these days unfortunately - they ceased being a cool company five
years ago :-(
My pair of O2's (a lowly R5k 180Mhz (the crappy one), and R12k 270Mhz)
are probably the most impressive machines I own (including my dual 2Ghz
G5 PowerMac). Having said that, they're somewhat unfriendly to
hobbyists, and they've
pretty much killed off what made them cool, the MIPS range and IRIX.
Yep, Sun seemed to get it right and actually encourage individuals to
use their software and hardware. SGI on the other hand remained pretty
elitist about things (perfectly within their right to do so I guess,
it's just a shame)
I
don't know what it would have taken, but I can't help but think that
they should have spent some resources porting IRIX to Itanium, rather
than spending all that effort on Linux.
Maybe they were paying royalties to various people on every copy of IRIX
sold, or the codebase had just got too ragged after so many years and a
ground-up rewrite was needed anyway to keep performance up on modern
hardware... I suppose there are all sorts of reasons.
I don't know why, I don't feel so bad about losing IRIX to Linux,
providing the SGI toolset's all still there. NT-on-SGI is another
matter, same with non-MIPS hardware...
Trivia: what was the downhill skiing game available on the Indy? It
featured some sort of egg-shaped character and I think was probably an
OpenGL demo. I vaguely remember it entertaining people at my old work...
cheers
Jules