The company was started by Jim Clark and Abby Silverstone back in 1982. Jim Clark studied at Stanford University, and along with Marc Hannah had created the revolutionary Geometry Engine - a VLSI implementation of geometry pipelines that provided dedicated silicon that boosted the “inner-loop” geometric computations required to generate three-dimensional graphics.
Silicon Graphics pioneered the computer graphics industry, and in the 80s and 90s there was hardly a feature film that wasn’t powered by their awe-inspiring technology. Favourites such as Twister got their amazing graphic effects from the graphical and processing power of SGI machines. If you remember the computer room in Jurassic Park - the large red computers were SGI Crimsons, ground breaking desk-side graphics workstations that actually generated most of the effects in the film.
The range of SGI computers used a chip developed by MIPS, and ran Silicon Graphics’ own flavour of UNIX called IRIX. SGI were the first company to release a 64bit chip and a 64bit OS, with the SGI Indy powered by a MIPS R4000 chip and (later) with IRIX 6.2. Now their computers are based around Intel processors and run modified versions of Linux.
Silicon Graphics’ computers have always been built for one thing - performance. Unlike a PC, the focus is never on pure chip performance, but on the balanced performance of the system as a whole. This makes the computers usable for years, giving them a long working life compared to other company’s products.
written by DavePF