John RegehrRE: https://vox.ominous.net/@occult/116317899239865990
SGI was way ahead of its time
https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes
Fabian Giesen
@regehr truly, the brand design of a company saying "we haven't gone bankrupt yet but we're thinking about it"
@regehr circular "I can't believe it's not a butthole" design aside, I liked the original SGI logo.
The logo they had before that with the gradients and the 3D-rendered Necker Cube was Very 90s (attached)
but the original one... I think that holds up. They should've gone back to that, maybe tweaked the font a little if they wanted to signal "this is the 2000s edition", but this was good!
@rygorous I know I've told this story before (and probably even to you) but a formative moment in my career was when ca. 1999 I was having dinner with someone fairly high up in the research / engineering wing of SGI, I asked how worried they were about the then-current graphics accelerator boards and the answer was "not even a little bit"
@regehr Yeah, a famous type of death spiral where you retreat upmarket until you're at the very top of end of the market only and when your competition comes for that too you have nowhere left to go
@regehr In this case, the thing to note too is that ex-SGI-ers ended up in basically every 3D accelerator startup ever.
To give two of the most clear spin-offs:
3dfx was, famously, founded by 3 ex-SGI engineers
ArtX (did the Gamecube/Wii GPUs, later bought by ATI) was 20 ex-SGI engineers and 2 ex-SGI executives
both mid-late 90s. So even if the people that ended up staying at SGI didn't see the way the wind was blowing, a lot of their people evidently did
Daniel Gibson@rygorous @regehr
apparently the whole SGI graphics team moved to nvidia in 1999: https://www.eetimes.com/sgi-graphics-team-moves-to-nvidia/
A year later nvidia bought 3dfx, which probably got him several ex-SGI people (unless they left, IDK)
@Doomed_Daniel @regehr what was left of it then, yeah. The 3dfx/ArtX things were earlier - 3dfx was founded 1994, ArtX 1997.
Notably SGI designed the graphics HW for the Nintendo 64 starting around '93 and released in '96. Presumably a lot of these people ended up going to ArtX?
@Doomed_Daniel @regehr My point being, it's not like they completely slept on consumer/commodity 3D.
They were there at ground zero, one of the first to ship consumer 3D mass-market HW with the Nintendo 64, and then evidently shrugged and decided "it will never catch on".
@Doomed_Daniel @rygorous feel like it's some pretty classic innovator dilemma shit