, also known as '''SGI''', began as a maker of graphics display terminals in 1982. It was founded by
Jim Clark and Abbey Silverstone. 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.
The products produced by SGI, 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.
Jim Clark left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at
Stanford University to found SGI 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.
The first -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.
With the introduction of the series, SGI switched over to using the
MIPS RISC microprocessors.. 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 . 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.
In 1992, MIPS released the first
64-bit MIPS microprocessor, the R4000, which was the first commercially released 64-bit RISC microprocessor (a market joined by Digital's
Alpha chip, ''inter alia'', soon thereafter). IRIX 6.2 was the first fully 64-bit IRIX release, including 64-bit pointers.
Up until the second generation Onyx Reality Engine machines, SGI offered access to their high performance 3D graphics subsystems through a proprietary
API known as 'Iris Graphics Language' (
IrisGL ). As more features were added over the years, IrisGL became harder to maintain and cumbersome to use. In 1992, SGI decided to clean up and reform IrisGL and made the bold move of allowing the resulting ''
OpenGL '' API be cheaply licensed by SGI's competitors - and yet further to set up an industry-wide consortium to maintain the OpenGL standard. (The OpenGL Architecture Review Board).
This meant that for the first time, fast, efficient cross-platform graphics programs could be written.
To this day, OpenGL remains the only real-time 3D graphics standard to be portable across a variety of operating systems. Its only competitor ('Direct-X' from Microsoft) only runs on MS Windows-based machines.
SGI was part of an early-90s initiative with
Compaq ,
Digital Equipment Corporation ,
MIPS Computer Systems ,
Groupe Bull ,
Siemens ,
NEC ,
NetPower and
Microsoft to introduce RISC-based
Windows NT workstations (the
Advanced RISC Computing , or ARC, initiative), but the efforts failed when Compaq changed management and Microsoft ultimately dropped NT support for MIPS and
DEC Alpha processors.
An SGI computer with the
FSN Three-dimensional file system navigator appeared in the 1993 movie ''
Jurassic Park ''. One trademark of this scene is Lex's line, "This is a Unix system. I know this."
In the movie
Twister , the heroes can be seen using an SGI laptop. It is in fact a working SGI, with a motherboard similar to that of the Indy. SGI made thirty or so in the early 90s, making the laptop quite a rarity. Given the power-hungry nature of the MIPS chip, not to mention what such a device would have cost in a time when an Apple PowerBook was considered expensive, the laptop was not a venture SGI seemed to be interested in taking.
Once inexpensive PCs began to catch up with SGI's bread-and-butter—the higher-priced specialized graphical workstations—in terms of graphics performance, SGI concentrated on its high performance server capabilities, offering servers for
Digital Video and the Web. Many SGI graphics engineers have left to work at other computer graphics companies like
ATI and
Nvidia , contributing to the PC 3D graphics revolution. SGI manufactured a groundbreaking LCD video monitor, the 1600SW.
In response to these market changes, Silicon Graphics Inc. changed its corporate identity to "SGI" in an attempt to clarify their current market position as more than simply a graphics company, although the legal name of the company remained unchanged. At the same time in 1999, SGI announced a new logo—simply the letters "sgi" in a stylized lowercase font — which drew criticism for wasting the professional goodwill associated with the previous box-outline logo. The new logo was a proprietary typeface called "SGI," created by branding and design consulting firm
Landor Associates , in collaboration with designer Joe Stitzlein.
The cube logo was later readopted by SGI. Currently both logos are in use.
