SGI was founded by Jim Clark and Abby Silverstone back in 1982. Jim Clark studied at Stanford University, and along with Marc Hannah had thought up the revolutionary Geometry Engine - a VLSI implementation of geometry pipelines that created dedicated hardware that powered the “inner-loop” geometric computations required to create three-dimensional images.

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 breathtaking computer effects from the graphical and processing power of Silicon Graphics machines. If you remember the computer room in Jurassic Park - the large red computers were Silicon Graphics Crimsons, ground breaking desk-side graphics workstations that actually generated most of the effects in the film.

The range of Silicon Graphics computers used a chip developed by MIPS, and ran Silicon Graphics’ own version of UNIX called IRIX. Silicon Graphics were the first company to release a 64bit chip and a 64bit OS, with the Silicon Graphics Indy powered by a MIPS R4000 chip and (later) with IRIX 6.2. Now their computers are based around Intel chips and run tuned releases 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 vendor’s products.

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