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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

Poor SGI. I used to love their website back in the 90s.

It's strange to think that alternative architectures were possible though and could get such a foothold in some industries. The specificity is mind-blowng. Everything is "PC"s today.

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It does blow my mind that back in the 90's that companies were rolling their own silicon and OS's without being absolute giants.

Huh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed they made PCs with their own OS

They made a couple of Intel boxes in the very late 90s / very early 00s, but the company was already on the way out by that point.

Back then there were quite a few competing architectures and UNIXes to go with them. SGI MIPS with Irix, IBM had POWER with AIX and later Linux, DEC had Alpha Tru64 UNIX and VMS (not a UNIX), Sun SPARC with Solaris, HP had HA-RISC with HP-UX. Only SPARC and POWER survived for long and only POWER survived until today as far as I know. Solaris of course lives on in various forms. The old UNIXes I guess mostly do not, being displaced almost entirely by Linux and BSDs.

IBM apparently still releases updates for AIX on POWER.

They still build POWER infrastructure too, but as far as I know Linux pretty much dominates. You can even buy POWER workstations from third party vendors like Raptor Computing Systems. Very expensive though.

I remember that SGI was superfast. I did some on-site work for a company that had an SGI workstation and I had installed TeX on it for a typesetting system I’d developed with them. When I ran the TeX process, it was so fast that the screen did not scroll as it ran, instead it just refreshed with the whole multi-line output. At first I thought something had gone wrong because I was used to waiting a few seconds for the code to run on my PC, but it turned out, no, their machines really were that fast.

Imagine if they'd made the titanium laptop before Apple, and actually shipped it with Irix .. would have been amazing.

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