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0 pointstombert1y ago0 comments

Yeah that's fair, as I mentioned, I wasn't really doing anything with Silicon Graphics in the 90s, so I'm only able to look back at this stuff from a kind of historical perspective, and it's easy for these things to kind of feel more legendary than they actually were as a result.

$2,000 might have been a bit ambitious, but sub $3,000 does seem like it was achievable, but it does make sense that Dell kind of swooped in and took that market.

You know, it's weird, because I always kind of considered Linux as a bit of a niche geeky thing. I run it, I like it, but I always sort of felt like I was the weird one, and I think for consumers I am, but reading about this stuff it looks like Linux caught on in workstation space pretty quickly. I noticed that the expensive professional video editing software has been used in Linux for awhile, it's just the consumer and prosumer side that struggled, and as you mentioned it has had a port to Maya for quite awhile.

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4 comments · 3 top-level

giantrobot1y ago· 1 in thread

Even a sub-$3k SGI would have been extremely difficult to pull off. PC manufacturers, even ones making higher end workstations, benefitted from Intel's economies of scale. Even if they were ordering custom motherboards they were picking a lot of components out of a catalog.

SGI machines had a lot more bespoke components. Even if they chased higher volumes they would have a far smaller scale than the PC space. Even then how would SGI chase volume even if they had a "cheap" option? They had no experience with retail sales. None of their reps would have tried to sell machines with lower price tags and sacrifice a commission.

The Indy (at $5k to start) was derided as an "Indigo without the go". I don't think SGI would have had any success building their own take on the PowerMac 4400. If an Indy couldn't make SGI customers happy there would be no way for a lower spec machine to do so.

eschaton1y ago

Also, keep in mind that an Intel-based system *competitive with an SGI system* was still *much* more than $2K to $3K.

You cannot simply compare the price of a no-name corner shop parts bin PC with something designed to the same standards as an actual workstation and declare that the latter "should" cost the same as the former.

nyrikki1y ago

While way too complex to accurately flesh out here, Linux took off mainly because the GNU userland had been in progress for almost a decade before and was ready, while the legal issues and rift on the 386BSD caused it to miss the window of common cdrom drives and the commercial internet.

But yes, I remember being forced to do some silly radio show in ~1997-8 where I was brought in to talk about Linux, as I had saved him a lot of money setting up DNS/Sendmail/Pop on PC's vs the decstations he was using.

Harley Hahn was the other person on the show, and despite Nasa and others using it, he was insistent that it would never replace commercial unix.

As I was maintaining OSF/1, SunOS, Irix, Interactive, SCO, AIX, AT&T, coherent UNIXs at that point, along with systems like MPE/IX, os400, OS/2, NT, Netware etc... day to day; it was quite obvious how much time and money it saved.

IIRC SCO single user desktop license w/networking was ~$800 and you had to pay another $600 more to get the development kit...without updates.

Obviously the huge bump in popularity was when LAMP became popular.

martinpw1y ago

> it looks like Linux caught on in workstation space pretty quickly.

At least for film and visual effects, this is because the industry was previously dominiated by SGI and most major studios had pipelines built on IRIX.

When NT systems became cost competitive, those studios were reluctant to switch even though the hardware was compelling, due to major challenges with the OS switch. However once Linux came along, it was easy since the OS was so similar. Cheaper hardware, same-ish OS. Done deal.

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