Silicon Graphics, SGI

SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) (NASDAQ: SGIC) began as a maker of graphics display terminals in 1982. It was founded by Jim Clark and Abbey Silverstone. more...

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The initial products were based on Jim Clark's work with geometry pipelines, specialized software or hardware that accelerates the display of three-dimensional images. SGI was originally incorporated as a California corporation in November 1981, and reincorporated as a Delaware corporation in January 1990. On 8 May 2006, SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from which it emerged on 17 October. SGI's former headquarters are now home to Google.

History

SGI’s products, as well as the strategies and market positions pursued by the company, have varied since SGI was founded. However, the graphical computing workstation industry has remained a focus and core business of SGI throughout its history.

Founding

Dr. James H. Clark left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at Stanford University to found SGI in 1982 along with Abbey Silverstone and a cadre of Stanford graduate students including Kurt Akeley, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, and Mark Grossman joined them 2 months later. The Mayfield Group supplied the initial venture funding.

First generation products

The first IRIS 1000-series machines (IRIS standing for "Integrated Raster Imaging System") were designed to be connected to a DEC VAX computer as a graphics terminal, handling only the actual display. These were based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, with a motherboard design related to that of the Sun-1. After that, SGI began using the UNIX System V operating system to power the machine. Their height was reached with the IRIS 3130, a complete UNIX workstation using the Motorola 68020 with an attached Weitek math coprocessor.

The 3130 was powerful enough to support a complete 3D animation and rendering package on its own without mainframe support. With large capacity hard drives (300MB X 2), streaming tape and Ethernet, it could be the centerpiece of an animation operation.

RISC era

With the introduction of the IRIS 4D series, SGI switched over to using the MIPS RISC microprocessor architecture. These machines were correspondingly more powerful, able to address more memory and came with powerful on-board math capability. These machines made much of the SGI name as 3D graphics became more popular on television and film.

SGI produced a broad range of MIPS-based workstations and servers during the 1990s, running SGI's version of UNIX System V, now called IRIX. These included the massive Onyx visualization systems, the size of refrigerators and capable of supporting up to 64 processors while managing up to three streams of high resolution, fully realized 3D graphics.

Read more at Wikipedia.org