So, lets see if I got this straight: >1997, release great MIPS computers >get guy who murdered HP-UX as CEO >he kills all hardware development and forces a switch to x86 and Windows >after having effectively killed SGI, he goes to work at Microsoft :^) >next "generation" of SGI computers are just normal PCs as they don't have any hardware or operating systems know-how anymore That is so 90's Microsoft. Damn.

My dad worked for SGI when I was a kid. I remember going to their Mountain View campus (part of which is now Google's HQ) for the occasional family events and "take your kids to work" days. Kind of sad how the company ended up, but I guess that's not uncommon in the tech industry.

This was the first company that rendered 3D graphics for video games, until NVIDIA and AMD later dominated the market.

I bought a used Octane in the early 2000s and still have it and boot it up once a while. Thanks for making the best SGI history video around. System architecture like the crossbar switch on these is still awesome and unique.

I've worked in the office where SGI had their offices, in Mississauga, for 12 years now. The interior before renovations a few years ago were magenta, that unmistakable SGI blue and yellows. Quite a funky space. Also, when I was at Carleton, in my second year, I had worked for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as a sys admin. They had a whole lab of Indys, Indigos and they also had Crimson which was my favourite machine to work on. The thing was massive and fast for the time. I miss working in IRIX. :)

A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.

Great video, thanks for the history lesson SGI. Being a former Motorola engineer, it was nice to see the history of a name plate we were all so familiar with, and thanks for pointing a out that trivia about Jurassic Park, I never knew that! I did not hear you come up for air once!

Being so young, @dodoid has done a good job on research and successfully created the video, thats an achievement in itself. well done, keep going.

I spent several years looking after SGI systems and even had an Indy myself. I miss those guys and especially IRIX, which I maintain was one of the best desktop O/S's I've ever used. A big part of me wishes I could go back to running Unix full time, it was certainly a lot bloody easier (I had practically everything about my job automated at one point). I know it all lives on in cloud hosted Linux driven applications, but there was something rad about those Sun, SGI and DEC servers and workstations. I should also point out that I've never forgiven Rick Belluzzo for what he did to SGI. A series of really bad decisions in a short space of time sealed their fate. I know they were up against the tidal wave of the PC, but I can't believe that with some better management they'd still be in business.

SGI computing was the best computing experience I've ever had. I enjoy your videos on this awesome time and culture.

US Postal Service used racks of the Origin 2000 to "read" addresses on envelopes as they were running through canceling machines at 36,000 per minute. The machine would spray a barcode on the envelope before it was sorted. If the system could not "read" the address, a florescent bar code sprayed on the back of the envelope contained information of the date, machine number, and identifier number, that was paired with the captured image, which was later read by an operator at a display console. Our facility had ten canceling machines and used a rack of 60 SG computers.

Dodoid did an amazing work by putting this together THIS IS AWESOME!!. I owned an Octane2 and that was my favorite workstation for running Maya and StudioTools ! You forgot to mentioned that they owned Alias at some point in time. And how influential they were in the development of movies and design work, in the areas of ID and Architecture. And that almost every industrial designer in the late 90's experienced Alias using O2 and Octane Interesting little design fact about the design of the o2 "The SGI O2 was a collaboration with Lunar design (at the time Yves behar, founder of Fuseproject, was part of the Lunar side of the equation). The original pitch was they should work with a team that used their products to “design” (up until then IDEO did most of the ID work, and ironically used Vellum CAD on Macs) - we were the designers that used SGI, lunar were the engineers on the SGI platform. Our combined efforts led to the round, friendly, yet sophisticated form language of this computer (you must also remember this predates the first iMacs by over 2 years), sending the message that the O2 was arguably the friendliest Unix workstation every made. This entry level machine nicknamed “the toaster” was powerful beast for its size - offering the cutting edge 3D graphics SGI was known for at “nearly” desktop prices (this meant $10k in 1996). At the time, SGI machines were the only computers that we could run Alias software (and many of these workstations we ran at Alchemy cost over $50k each, and we had 6 of them). This was an exciting program for us, at all levels. The O2 ended up being SGI’s the one and only “low cost” workstation they produced - the company soon lost its edge to the on-slot of cheep & powerful PC’s from Dell and HP. Their slow and reluctant movement to the PC platform ended up being their demise (ironically many of the smartest engineers left SGI to form Nvidia, the leader the 3D graphics industry today)." www.grayholland.com/first-experiences/

This is easily the best tech history video I've ever watched.

Fantastic video dude... Congratulations. Enjoyed all of it.

Hard to believe that it has been a few years since I first came acrose this channel. Hope you’re doing well in life, as we are always here waiting for you decide to update us.

This was a delightful and thorough SGI documentary. Excellent job! Thank you for it. 😊

thanks for putting all of these together. love your videos btw

SGI & Sun were the best workstations before the PC's. AND Cray supercomputers are the very best in supercomputing. Even though you barely scratched the surface on the Onyx 2, I just would like to say great Job on the history of SGI bro!

Instantly subscribed! Amazing summary of SGI!

This is possibly one of the best put together videos on KZfaq. You are better than TV ever manages to be.

That Crossbar power ballad cracked me up! :D

Very impressive history of Sgi, I have had the pleasure of working on almost all of the systems Sgi offered over the years and was lucky to visit their facility just before it was sold to Google. Thanks !

Love the history and your video format in general, keep it up man you're going to do well I know it.

I worked for SGI in Mountain View in the 90’s. Great video! I enjoyed the flashback of the machines I used daily.

I haven't heard of SGI until your SGI Onyx video and then I clicked to watch this. What a gem I must say! Liked and subbed - no questions asked: your narration is humble yet professional and it's really easy to see that you have passion towards the subject. Don't you dare stop making videos, because the SGI History was one of the most entertaining long watches I've had in a good while. Thank you for the knowledge and keep this up. Mad props from Russia ✊🏻

Thank you Dodoid, you had did alot of research. You are a budding KZfaq Star! Thank you for your fantastic historical introductions of Silicon Graphics. I believe you can do other companies as well ^^

I was there using these machines, all the way back to 1992. Thank you for the history video young man. I still have a few of these workstations hanging around!

This kid puts great content into his vids. Not sure how much research you put in but kudos to the technical content. Keep it up

Silicon Graphics played a HUGE role in the rise of computer-generated effects in movies and TV shows in the 80s and 90s as well as the rise of Pixar Animation Studios. It is truly legendary.

Thanks for a great video! I worked as an SGI field engineer between 1994 - 2001. Brings back many good memories, sad to see the eventual decline of a once great bleeding edge company.

Hey Dodoid, great job, really appreciate the work. You brought back forgotten memories of finite element analysis at Uni using SGI machines (or maybe a VAX!)

Great video my friend. Takes me back to computing in the 80's and 90's. A lot of great info and I'm sure it took you a while to put together.

Great job. I love the speed and the consistency of your video. Because we don't have time to watch a long video on youtube nowadays. Liked and subscribed. Keep doing short but consistent videos please. Thank you.

Nice! Thanks for creating this. Actually I'm glad you talk fast - it matches the high I/O SGI's always had. :) Really enjoyed working there in 1995-1999, and have lifelong friends because of it. Everyone I know that worked there has been amazingly successful after, as well.

Very nice video. Made the complicated SGI product understandable. Thanks for your hard work

very well produced and informative documentary! great job!

Sweet review of the companies history and funky computer cases. The video progressed swiftly and the 40mins flew by!

Thanks for making this video! I learned a lot about the Silicon Graphics company that I didn't know already. :-)

5:49 - HAH! Thank you! That's so incredibly validating... Having essentially "grown up" at SGI (my mom worked there when I was in high school, and had a Personal Iris at her desk; later, I worked there off and on throughout much of the '90's), I can't tell you the number of times something "new" has come out since, and I've been like "oh, cool, someone else FINALLY HAS THIS THING THAT I'VE BEEN MISSING" [because, you know, I'd had it decades earlier on SGI machines]. There's still stuff I've not seen on other platforms, that I miss. Sigh. Anyway, thanks for the trip back! Nice to see that they're inspirational to others, as well. :) It was far and away the coolest place I've ever worked (and I've worked at several of the big names). Edit: watching more, a few other things to comment on... [some of which I've scattered as replies to other comments.] 26:37 - can attest to Casey Leedom... I remember him from my time in the engr (engineering) org circa 1998. I liked him. I don't recall if I ever had Hamburger Stew, though... I don't think so, but maybe I heard him talk about it?? It vaguely rings a bell. I found the recipe... maybe I'll try it someday. :) 37:16 ... :'( Good stuff, all around. A couple things you missed: Silicon Studio (an internal division for a while, that might be worth talking about), and Alias | Wavefront -- the merger of Alias and Wavefront when SGI bought both, merging the two together (or really, the three -- Silicon Studio kinda got shut down, but many of the employees, including myself, became employees of Alias | Wavefront, under a new Mountain View office (where neither Alias nor Wavefront had previously had offices, IIRC), using the same building (SGI building 21) as Silicon Studio had been in. Dunno if you ever plan to do a follow-up, but if so, it might be cool to include that... and maybe just more on the software side, generally -- IRIX, Showcase, Indigo Magic Desktop and 4Dwm, etc. Totally optional, of course... it's just a thought. Anyway, thanks for the nostalgia trip!

Thanks for the great video! I worked for SGI for a little over a decade during their heyday (1985-1997) Absolutely the best job and company I've ever had or will have. The product and culture were truly one of a kind. Unfortunately, once Jim Clark and Mark Adreesen left to start Netscape, the company was never the same. Next video, you need to research and highlight the internal culture that made it such an amazing place (ie: Lip Sync at the amphitheater, new building roller skating parties, product launch events, free monogrammed everything etc. - look it up...it was awesome!)

4:28 I love the idea that a 10 year old girl not only had readily available access to a $30,000 computer but she also knew how to use very complex professional developer software.

Hi Dodoid, every now and then I reminisce about SGI and just came across your video. I really enjoyed it. I worked at SGI from 1984 to the summer of 2001 when most of the field service management team were let go. Prior to SGI I was working for System Industries, a Ca. start-up, in NJ as a regional service manager. I started as a field engineer and traveled the east coast installing and maintaining their data management systems. My employee number was 203. They first connected into the DEC PDP-8, machines and then up from there as things advanced. I became branch and then regional service manager. I was at SI for 9 year's before I got tired of it. My Boston branch manager at SI resigned to join another startup in Ca. named SGI. He was the first guy on the east coast. He said he would call me when they needed another field engineer in the east. In 1984, six months later, I left SI for SGI. My employee number was 206. I met Ed MacCracken on my first trip to the west coast. His employee number was 204, I think. I traveled up and down the east coast again doing what I liked best. Installing and fixing the hardware. It was the beginning of what we now know as computer graphics. I was in the room when Jim Clark gave a lecture on his visions of the future in the industry. He talked about virtual sets, cable tv, and how actors would be replaced by animated characters. Flowing hair and wind was really hard to animate. I set up a system in a hotel banquet room for Jim when he came east to do a lecture. I remember when SGI had 3 big trucks that traveled the country to be at NFL football games. I had to send an SSE (System Support Engineer) to be with the truck when it came here in the NYC metro area. It had two complete systems on it including spare parts. The system tapped into the live TV feed to insert the first down line and game score on the screen. Do a search for “An Explanation of the Football 1st & Ten Line.“ I also had and SSE at CBS studios in NYC for the 1996 presidential election when Dan Rather used a touch screen map of the US to show results on TV. Do a search for “Video 1996 Election Night, CBS Touchscreen Map" to see it. The SGI cube logo is on the map screen. My SSE had 5 seconds of fame when CBS did a live cut to the computer room and he was in the shot. Of course I always stayed to see the credits of the movies that SGI systems were used in. I still have my “Building A Better Dinosaur” tee shirt. I feel SGI’s demise started when Ed MacCracken left and that guy from HP took over as president. Ed also came from HP. I liked Ed a lot. We strayed from our core mission of computer graphics to something else. I hated it when the classic logo changed. After the purchase of CRAY the service management team went to Minneapolis for a few days, in the winter, to meet their service team. Our field staffs were integrated. The people were all great to work with but some of us were asking if we still had the receipt of sale so we can return it. If you’re still reading this. When the NT product line came out I switched jobs again. My new title was something like “North America NT Systems Support Manager.” All the field service on these smaller systems was actually provided by a company named Entex. Their service staff supported many different types of smaller computer systems. Once a month or so I traveled to their Cincinnati office to review operations with them in the US. The rest of the time I helped put out fires and helped to resolve logistics issues regarding spare parts. I also then assisted with the customer satisfaction programs in the US. I helped correlate all the surveys results and passed out the information to the field branches. Somewhere in the beginning of 2001 or so the NT product line had ended. Entex took over all the spare parts and kept doing their thing. Me and most of SGI’s US field management staff were let go. I happened to be in the middle of my third or forth sabbatical. I was expecting it. My boss called me on the phone and asked me if he needed to come to NJ or could he just send the paper work to the office for me to sign. Just send it. I got a 9 month severance package, that was very nice, 9/11 happened a few months later, and the world went on.

Sick video bro, KEEP IT UP!

This is awesome. Nice job!

The then state-of-the-art 64-bit R4000 processor is used as the CPU for the Sony PSP released in 2005.

Very nice! Would be interesting to see a video like this on DEC!

I envy the breathless excitement of youth :)

FANTASTIC video man! thanks for the effort and to set the history books straight, loved the "Sorry mac book pro, you're 23 years to late" line. haha.

Awesome video, I really like your editing style, keep it up!

Good video, well written script, good delivery, very solid editing, great content in the channel... Subscribed.

One of my best workplace friends in the 1980s left the CAD/CAE startup I was at to work for SGI in administrative support with the sales division in Mountain View. One telltale clue about her: She was a fanatical Pittsburgh Steelers fan. She seemed happy working at SGI. I've thought about her over the years and have wondered how she has faired over the years; but google searches have turned up nothing.

Excellent work my main man!

Great video. You narrate very well. When I was in college at UT Austin we had an SGI lab. That was my first experience with SGI. It was soooo cool. My first job out of college in the late 90's was working for Compaq. I wrote device drivers to test hardware. In our lab we had an unreleased early version of Itanium. When you powered it on, it sounded like a jet engine with a giant fan. Later, I bought a cheap SGI O2 and SGI flat panel display. That was one of my favorite all time computers. I miss Irix and MIPS and the cool designs of SGI. It was totally memory lane watching this video. Thank you.

Great video, keep em coming bro :) I wondered what happened to SGI, I remember seeing them around in the 90s before I got into computers

such an amazing video. excellent research, thank you so much!

This is great. Well done for researching it all. The thing I'd like to see is more dates. It is crucial to state when products were released to put it in the context of surrounding systems of the day. This is especially so in the period up to 1985 when there were so many changes in computer graphics.

Masterpiece! Thanks for all the info, very interesting

Phantastic documentation! Subscribed!

Nice to see blue mountain. Been many years since it was hauled off, and today most of the equipment I manage is in that same room. Thanks for the cool video.

Great job.. I enjoyed watching this video.. keep up the good work.

Having worked with and owned a variety of SGIs over the years, this is the most concise history I've seen/heard... also makes me want to find the purple feet for my Indigo2. :)

Wow you make amazing well informed videos. They are extremely great content. Thank you for your awesome videos keep it up.

Wow! I worked at sgi and really appreciate this. Thank you for this great historical video.

A very extensive analysis. Excellent work

Fucking love SGI they made me dream about having their kit...

Excellent work on the sgi product line, however the essential part of sgi's history is their super duper development team. Hopefully this will be a future topic for your super duper channel...

Wow. So much going on here! Great video.

Too bad you didn't mention but in passing the so famous "Reality Engine" born on the Crimson. As John Carmack said, it was the target for all 3D graphics manufacturers for many years. Other noticeably informations worth mentioning: nVidia was founded by ex-SGI people. Belluzzo sold out the very best SGI 3D IP to Microsoft (after the failed Farenheit common 3D API project) and to nVidia (because who cares of gaming 3D cards makers?), this was really the worst thing he did.

Great retrospective, good job.

Fascinating, thanks dodoid

You are the best man. Great Video. Impressive well done.

14:51 - OMG, Thats my SGI Indigo that I converted into a PC about 20 years ago! I know this made me part of SGI history but wow, what a kicker seeing that image again! I still have the unit and two other Indigo cases. I think these days I would put a Raspberry Pi in to and a bunch of USB drives running OpenMedia Vault however. Wow, that woke me up - love the video, try speaking slower though - people need to take in what you're saying :o)

Great video. Thank you!

Love this history lesson, ill have to keep coming back to learn it all

I would have never imagine a young man would be the one to so well articulate and document the past so well. You do your generation proud.

this video is amazing. I remember being 12 back in the 90s and being obsessed with Industrial Light and Magic. I really wanted an SGI computer because I wanted to make stuff like jurassic park. I eventually got a copy of 3d studio from my cousin who was in graphics. I was pretty lucky. Anyways great job on the video it really brought me back.

I worked on SGI's in 98/99 for Kodak. I still love them. Irix 6.5 and XFS were awesome.

Dude, you know your stuff. I was programming for Software Sciences International in those days, before ending up at Control Data. I remember SGI. They had a reputation as the go-to folks for graphics rendering.

What a wonderful video...!!! Thank you...

You get a sub for this fantastic effort. Well done sir.

I worked in SGI's IT department in Mountain View for several years starting in 1986.

Youve got a great channel, young fella!

you are amazing at what you do!!

This was one o the most interesting videos I ever watched in YT.

This was very well done thank you

The MIPS CPUs are RISC-based. During those days, the big computer companies banded together to support a common architecture, I think it was called ARC or something. Digital was one of them, I remember. Anyway, great video and so much detail. Kudos to reserach. You brought me back to those days where people were green in envy when they find out you work with SGI machines. I kept a copy fo IRIX 5 as a memento.

great trip down memory lane, i worked on a sgi cluster back when writing software in the late 1990's I remember transitioning from a CDC mainframe to the sgi cluster & it was like a new world had been opened up.

Inspiring how passionate you tell this story, iirc, the R10000 "T5" design had another designation , called "Terminator" (the analogy of "agressive" speculative branching...) and later versions were developed in the PRC codename "Dragon".. (here be a snowden funfact) I found the sight of 300 intel- powered Drones performing with the imagination of the intel drone team somewhat visually reminiscent of the well know irix screensaver. History has it, one of the userland Indy had the Indycam for gesture recognition I believe someone from the Netherlands wrote it. SGI is so much innovation I suppose, elegant and proven technology.

Well done. And, very accurate. I'm loathed to say that I recall a lot of this as it was happening since it reveals I'm old now

This is awesome. I grew up fantasizing about these as a kid in the late 80's and early 90's. Wikipedia and 'articles on the net cleared up some of what they actually did versus fantasy but not really..... What an amazing video!

gosh great job for a young kid ... i was secretly hoping you were using an old SGI to put these videos together

I've always said SGI is ahead of its time. During the '90s, when video conferencing was only all talk, Indy came with a video conferencing camera, I think they called it Indycam. They tested video on demand when people were renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster and Netflix was still light years away. When you attend Siggraph during those times, the software vendors - almost all of them use SGI, because only in SGI they can have visualization. From scientific to medicine to oil and gas to engineering.

Great Video!

Amazing amount of research. New subscriber.

I saw an Indy on the SGI campus at around the time Jurassic Park came out. I wasn't blown away or anything, since I had a Mac, but I did like the desktop. A few years later, I got to tear apart Indys, Indigos, O2's and Octanes. I was assigned a Sparc 5, but I did get sudo on an Origin 200, which was our main server.

To me it looks like one CEO ruined it all in less than 2 years.

Thank you, well done!

You make good content. Wish you kept making it

Great video! I have a passing interest, since i worked for a company that used the Indigo, then the Indy in a confocal laser microscope for wafer inspection back in the ‘90s. That was my first exposure to a Unix style OS. I still have a set of the RGB juggling balls somewhere. On another note, have you ever considered making how-to videos for making KZfaq videos? That might be a good “second channel” for you. Your videography and editing is great, in my view.

very informative video !!