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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Another example missing in the article was the graphics workstations with SGI.

I remember considering spending lots of student-budget money in 1993 for an SGI Indy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy), a low-end graphics workstation from SGI. I think this was shortly before peak-SGI.

I'm glad I didn't, because (a) PCs started to see impressive graphics performance improvements not so longer after; (b) I went to industry and ended up working in enterprise software instead.

SGI market cap peaked in 1995, here's a HN discussion of a 1997 article of SGI's "Sad Saga": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8462841 . They shifted focus to scientific/enterprise compute and storage after and dwindled away.

Exactly, and for pretty much the same reason. Once CMOS prices got to the point where 3D graphics acceleration (not SGI's only core competency, but pretty close revenue-wise) was desired at consumer volume, they were toast. NVIDIA had they beat on almost everything that mattered by 1998 or so.

I remember when my scientician friends started switching from SGI to multiple super-beefed-up Dells in the early 2000's. They could get five monster custom Dell machines for the price of one Octane or Indigo or whatever. And they delivered better performance. (Or so they told me.)

There was about two or 3 generations of either PC hardware or software (Windows) not being able to handle what SGI hardware could, no matter what the price.

Don't forget the nail in the coffin: the windows nt-based SGI workstation...

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