22 Apr
2016
22 Apr
'16
5:51 p.m.
On 4/19/16 14:58, Swift Griggs wrote:
one of your software vendors. Ugh. Of course,
watching SGI under Rick
Belluzo (I hated that guy) wasn't much easier. "Ohhh, I'm ex-Microsoft so
let's make Windows NT workstations." Ugh, Puh!, Bleh.... grrreeeeaaat idea,
guys. I wish the board could be retroactively fired for that.
It so happened that I had a front-row seat for that debacle (ok, maybe
fourth-row), having attended one of the SGI road show events at which
the Visual Workstation line was introduced, by none other than Rick B.
himself. I worked with several people who were doing 3D modeling at the
time. None of us could figure out why SGI would dive into the low end
of the market when it seemed as though 3D hardware was about to become
commoditized in a big way. Maybe they were gambling on becoming Nvidia
or 3DFX, and lost.
That wasn't the only SGI-Microsoft collaboration which went bad though;
Around that time, I also went to a technical presentation about the
Fahrenheit graphics API which was going to replace OpenGL. It was
stillborn and went nowhere. Although I think I've read that bits and
pieces of Fahrenheit went into Vulkan, much later on.