You can check https://maxxinteractive.com/ for more information.
That said the desktop looks amazing! Love the theme.
I feel like my i3wm setup is extremely streamlined for instance.
That's why I keep Hatari installed... but I don't try to use it as my development environment.
Didn't the ST run GEM? Now that I think about it, I believe GEM could run on a bunch of different computers. I'll have to see if I can find a version to install on one of my banger laptops.
I got some janky 486 laptops for note-taking in university and swapped between that and OS/2 3.0 with its rudimentary pack-in wordprocessor. PC/GEOS would have been even better, but was not readily available at thwe time, as I think it was still a commercial product targeted towards schools using hand-me-down PCs.
AFAIU the atari version was a little more capable and a bit more fun than the other versions, due to Apple suing DRI and crippling later versions to comply with Apple's demands, yet somehow Atari was excluded from those demands since they bought rights to the source code for further development so continued with the original concept.
Things like the CPU performance monitor were a joy to see and haven't been improved on. Same goes for the screen savers, not that we have them now.
There was nothing clunky about the magical desktop and normally your applications were tools that cost tens of thousands. Mere mortals thought they were seeing the future and what a brilliant future that was. The web was going to be VRML 3D in those days but we ended up with 2D bloat.
The tools you have shape how you think and SGI just made your thinking creative and imaginative. Everyone else was on Windows which had great apps like MS Office but an SGI machine had none of those civilian programs.
IMHO Ubuntu has a desktop that falls short of what SGI had even though it is an environment that doesn't distract in the way that Windows does.
How I see it is that you have consumer operating systems such as Windows, ChromeOS and OSX and you have professional operating systems such as what classic UNIX machines had. Linux desktops are in this professional mould.
Susan Kare?
More information about her work on SGI:
In the old days Silicon Graphics had this almost mythical reputation. As a kid with a home computer I used to daydream about one day getting my hands on an SGI, what kind of games I'd be able to make on it.
The computer scene was more fragmented back then. Graphics Workstations sat apart from home computers, and the ordinary Amiga or C64 user would only read about them in magazines or see them featured in TV shows about movie special effects.
If you liked computer graphics, these TV shows and articles were like glimpses ten years into the future. Because of this, SGI became a byword for "amazingly cool computer with powerful, exotic graphics hardware that I will never get my hands on" Many of us hoped that one day we'd be playing video games on an SGI home computer or vr deck.
Seeing this question asked makes me sad. If you are browsing this on Linux then you're probably using code descended from Netscape which was developed by a guy called Zawinski on an SGI Indy.
Or if you have seen a movie, then all the special effects are descended from work done on SGI machines.
If you have fuel in your car, the oil field was probably originally found after running seismic analysis on an SGI. They were famous for their movie work but Oil & Gas was actually a far bigger market for them.
If you have flown anywhere, the pilot was trained on a simulator descended from technology developed by SGI.
If you program C++ then STL comes from SGI. As does the XFS filesystem.
If you have seen a weather forecast on TV, that probably was done on a Cray, who for a while were owned by SGI and who developed a lot of their tech. Many TV stations used SGIs to render the forecast on the green screen behind the presenter too.
If you have played Nintendo, the MIPS processor in it was developed by SGI. If you play games on PC, OpenGL was developed by SGI.
They were once one of the most influential computing companies in the world. Now they are merely a legend, and a fading one at that :-(
Me too, Irix, XFS (The Redhat std FS) and so much more was made by SGI.
Been a while and I had nearly forgotten! It used to be that when you googled an STL container, SGI documentation came up first. This was occasionally annoying as there were a few things that were slightly different from what was standardized. If memory serves, they had a better hash table before the standard did...
Didn't STL came from HP?
On the early days of the Web, and pre C++98, it was where most of us would read how to use the existing STL implementations.
These workstations were incredibly powerful and extremely expensive (think > $250,000 for the higher end gear in the 1990s) but pretty amazing.
Also, for the time it had very advanced user interfaces. SGI Irix was the name of the OS which ran on these machines.