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they had a monochrome version of the logo... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/SGI-indi...

> Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky.

Now this is just silly. By 1999 most web users had at least True Color displays at SVGA if not XGA. While VGA resolutions with 256 colors were a design consideration those users were not the norm.

With that said, the old SGI looked just fine even at 256 colors. The shape was distinctive and it was all grayscale so 256 color palettes had all the colors needed for the logo with little noticeable dithering. There were even good 1-bit versions that were very distinctive.

Monitors used by people who cared about SGI or did anything with graphics design we're at least 800x600. And the screens my company had at the time were all 1024x768 already (including the screen of our single SGI Iris Indigo).

As others said: a good logo is always also good in black and white.

The old SGI logo was cast in plastic as a 2.5D version on the workstations, color printed in color brochures and otherwise there was a much simplified black and white version.