Silicon Graphics - the geometry of Hollywood

Founder Jim Clark left in 1994 to co-found Netscape; the company's Cray chapter, its two bankruptcies, and the 2016 HPE acquisition close the loop told in the profile below.

The machines began with the Geometry Engine that Clark and Marc Hannah had designed at Stanford under an ARPA contract, and Clark left his associate professorship in electrical engineering to found the company with seven Stanford graduate students and research staff, Kurt Akeley among them. The encyclopaedia dates the founding to November 1981 in Mountain View; this site carries 1982, the year Clark left Stanford, by a ruling recorded on the citation beside it. The graphics went out through a proprietary library, IRIS GL, until 1992, when SGI reformed it as OpenGL, licensed it cheaply to its own competitors and set up the OpenGL Architecture Review Board to keep the standard: the API outlived the company that wrote it.

IRIX was the operating system, its name a portmanteau of IRIS and UNIX, System V with BSD extensions on MIPS processors. SGI began using the name with release 3.0 in 1988 for the IRIS 4D line, and XFS, like OpenGL, was built for it before being ported to Linux. An SGI Crimson running the fsn three-dimensional file navigator appeared in Jurassic Park in 1993, which is the frame most people remember the company by. The last release, 6.5.30, came on 16 August 2006.

In February 1996 SGI bought Cray Research for $740 million. Then came the moves that, in the encyclopaedia's words, damaged its credibility: the Visual Workstations running Windows NT in the late 1990s, a financial disaster that shook customer confidence in the MIPS line, and the premature announcement of a migration from MIPS to Intel's Itanium, whose systems ran SUSE Linux rather than IRIX. A 2001 Computerworld review found IRIX in a critical state; MIPS and IRIX customers persuaded SGI to keep supporting the platform through 2006.

The end came in two bankruptcies. SGI filed for Chapter 11 on 8 May 2006 and emerged on 17 October 2006; on 6 September 2006 it announced the end of the MIPS and IRIX product lines, production ended on 29 December 2006 with final deliveries in March 2007, and support ran out in December 2013. On 1 April 2009 it filed again and sold substantially all its assets to Rackable Systems, a deal announced at $25 million and finalised on 11 May 2009 for $42.5 million, with Rackable adopting Silicon Graphics International as its name. Hewlett Packard Enterprise completed the acquisition of that company on 1 November 2016 at $7.75 a share, calling it a leader in high performance compute, data analytics and data management, and placing the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames in its portfolio.