Seeking immediate rescue of full-rack SGI ONYX near Northbrook, IL

[Andrew M Hoerter]

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.