I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma", which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.

Not only are virtually all organizational processes and incentives fundamentally aligned against effectively responding, the best practices, patterns and skill sets of most managers at virtually every level are also counter to what they must do to effectively respond. Having been a serial tech startup founder for a couple decades, I then sold one of my startups to a valley tech giant and ended up on the senior leadership team there for a decade. I'd read Innovator's Dilemma in the 90s and now I've now seen it play out from both sides, so I've thought about it a lot. My key takeaway is that an incumbent's lack of effective response to disruption isn't necessarily due to a lack of awareness, conviction or errors in execution. Sure, there are many examples where that's the case but the perverse thing about I.D. is that it can be nearly impossible for the incumbent to effectively respond - even if they recognize the challenge early, commit fully to responding and then do everything within their power perfectly.

I've even spent time sort of "theory crafting" how a big incumbent could try to "harden" themselves in advance against potential disruption. The fundamental challenge is that you end up having to devote resources and create structures which actually make the big incumbent less good at being a big incumbent far in advance of the disruptive threat appearing. It's hard enough to start hardcore, destructive chemo treatment when you actually have cancer. Starting chemo while you're still perfectly healthy and there's literally no evidence of the threat seems crazy. It looks like management incompetence and could arguably be illegal in a publicly traded company ("best efforts to maximize/preserve shareholder value" etc).

After all that training, still nobody did it (ok I did and one other guy). That company couldn't change anything. It was amazing.

They had a project to change a department into more proactive than reactive. The solution was to create a lot of bureaucracy surrounding being proactive. As you can imagine bureaucracy about being proactive was really just institutionalizing ... not being proactive.

I eventually left and work at a smaller company now. It's been refreshing for years now when we can decide "this process doesn't work, let's not do it anymore" and it just happens. Even just new coworker: "I won't be in tomorrow, who do I tell?", me: "you just did, have a great time off" seems revolutionary after being at a big company for so long.

I'm convinced that as the sheer numbers of humans increases the friction to making real change in a company decreases and there's not much you can do. Fundamental change to respond to real disruption, nigh impossible.

SGI could double down on their servers and supercomputers, which they did for a while, but without entry-level options, their product lines becomes the domain of legacy clients who are too afraid (or too smart) to port to cheaper platforms. And being legacy in a highly dynamic segment like HPC is a recipe for disaster. IBM survived because their IBMi (the descendant of the AS/400) and mainframe lines are very well defended by systems that are too risky to move tied to hardware that's not that much more expensive than a similarly capable cluster of generic and less capable machines. As the market was being disrupted from under them, they retreated up and still defend their hill very effectively.

The other movement they could do was to shift downwards, towards the PC, and pull the rug from under their workstation line. By the time Microsoft acquired Softimage and had it ported to NT, it was already too late for SGI to even try that move, as NT was solidified as a viable competitor in the visual computing segment, running on good-enough machines much, much cheaper than anything SGI had.

SGI had invested in building significant strengths and competency in its sales and distribution structure. This was one of their key competitive moats. Unfortunately, not only did the shift in economics make this strength irrelevant, it turned it into a fundamental weakness. All that workstation-centric sales, distribution, service and support infrastructure dramatically weighed down their payroll and opex. This was fine as long as they could count on the higher margins of their existing business. While it's easy to say they should "just layoff all those people and relaunch as a desktop company" that can't be done in one quarter or even one year. It requires fundamentally different structures, processes, systems and skill sets. Hiring, training and integrating all that while paying for massive layoffs and shutting down offices, warehouses etc takes time and costs a lot of money.

Worse, once their existing workstation customers saw them shutting down the SGI the customers had bought workstations and service contracts from to become a different kind of company entirely, sales revenue would have taken an overnight nosedive. SGI's stock would also have tanked far more immediately than it did as the fickle stock market investors sold stock they'd bought because SGI offered a specific risk/return expectation which just became much more "risk" and much less "return" (at least in the near-term). In making such a dramatic move SGI would have effectively dumped much of their current quarterly revenue and the value of one of their core strengths - all at the same moment. Thus turning them into one of their emerging startup competitors with all of a startup's disadvantages (no big ongoing revenue streams, no big cash pile (or high stock valuation to leverage for cash)) yet none of a startup's strengths (nimble, lower-paid staff and more patient venture investors).

The point of my earlier post was mainly that a true disruptive market shift is nearly impossible for a large, established incumbent to successfully survive because they basically have to rapidly turn into someone else almost overnight. How can a champion sumo wrestler survive a shift so dramatic that their sport quickly turns into a track meet? Even seeing it coming doesn't help. How does one even prepare for such a shift since losing mass turns you into a bad sumo wrestler long before you even start being a viable sprinter? As Christiansen observed, such disruptions are often enabled by technology but the actual cause of incumbent death is often due to the shift turning an incumbent's own strengths into weaknesses almost overnight.

The real failure is not picking up new business along the way. With the N64 they showed they could design a consumer product. But outside of that they were in no future consoles. 3dfx and ArtX both came from former SGI. You don't need to stop selling workstations just because you make chips for consoles and other such devices. Nvidia barely survived and might not have if not for consoles. There are other markets where their expertise could have been applied.

Surviving changes like that often requires finding other markets. And then when it comes to making hard choices you need to cut part of the thing that is unprofitable. But this is really hard to do and in some ways it goes against the 90s US corporate philosophy of focusing only on the 'Core' business. DEC for example sold profitable business units that might have been helpful to have. DEC had a printer business and had the potential for a Database business. Oracle calls RDB one of the best acquisitions.

Commodore tried for a play where their - still much lower end - newest generation chipset would have scaled (with the same chips) from being a full low end computer, console, or set-top box, computer (it had a PA RISC core on chip, so could run standalone), a high end graphics card for PCs, and the chipset for a higher end Amiga at the same time.

They ran out of money - short maybe a few million - before being able to test if that would have worked as a way to widen their market.

I wish we'd have gotten to see how that'd unfolded, though Commodore's deep management dysfunction probably still would have made it fail.

They also missed an (earlier) boat with the Commodore 900 workstation, which would run Mark Williams' Coherent OS (a Unix-like system).

ChuckMcM was at Sun at the time, and mentioned a while back he tried to get Sun to buy Commodore outright:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585430 (his later replies in that sub-thread are also worth reading)

There are some vintage computer club talks where they dive into this.

With exception of a few UNIX systems like Irix, Solaris with NeWS, NeXTSTEP, Apollo, everything else tends to be the same deck of cards reshuffled.

They didn't really miss the boat on that. The C900 wasn't really an attractive machine. They would have sold it at a pretty high price. At the same time you could buy a PC with Unix on it that was arguable better. It would have just been another market where they got clobbered by the PC. Not like Zilog was the right horse to bet on anyway.

IBM also came into the game more vertically integrated. Having your own fab is expensive, but if you read on what Sun and SGI had to do in order to get chips, that route also wasn't great.

In the beginning there was a chance that Sun and SGI could have merged, the reason it didn't happen was mostly because leadership couldn't agree on who would lead the company. Between them they duplicated a lot of technology while sitting right next to each other. Both doing their own RISC chips, at times Sun was doing their own graphics cars, competing in 'low' priced and mid priced work stations, incomparable Unix developments, competing in the large SMP market against each other. If they had been together and things could have been different a larger install base and more investment into the architecture might have given them a better chance.

I think the real problem here is PC workstations, with Windows NT (later Linux) and an Intel chip, could do 90% of the SGI workstations for a fraction of the price. By workstation I mean an honest workstation with a high end graphics card, 10k RPM SCSI drives, and hundreds of megs of RAM.

The price of SGI workstations was "call us" which translates to tens of thousands of dollars per workstation. PC workstations didn't and couldn't replace all uses of SGI workstations. What SGI was not able to handle was the fact their customers suddenly having a viable option besides paying them tens of thousands of dollars for their workstations. Even their Visual Workstations weren't a real improvement cost wise as those were still overpriced compared to competitors' PC workstations.

ARM is the only one left standing from that era which with hindsight seemed so unlikely.

ARM had the advantage in that space of starting from the very low end, and being able to squeeze margins instead of being squeezed.

ARM survived this long because it had a niche others couldn't break into (and still can't) as the highest performance per watt anywhere.

RISC architectures live on today. Your house likely has dozens of MIPS chips in various components. You've got more ARM chips for sure but no shortage of other RISC chips in various components.

I remember a talk by Clayton Christensen talking specifically about Intel and how they setup the Celeron division to compete with themselves (based on his advice).

A key property of tech in economics lingo is that it is “natural monopolies” - all fixed cost and no variable cost.

This creates these winner takes all games. In this case both Intel, SGI plus others knew the rules and it just ended up with Intel taking the prize and it all becoming Wintel for a decade or so - basically until the smart phone allowed enough capital to be accrued to challenge the old monopoly.

During good times focus on your core and then peter out. Just follow a nice parabolic arc.

A lot of success is just timing and attempting to fight all threats look foolish. A remember, for every up and comer that “we all saw coming” there were lots that didn’t make it. If you waste time fighting those you wasted money.

There's no way the shareholders win this lawsuit. Violating fiduciary duty involves doing things you know won't provide value. Long term planning would be a defense for this.

The shareholders could absolutely oust those executives, though. And they may very well do so.

The red team designs a new streamlined look with less click baity posts and fewer ads. Users flock to it, abandoning the existing platform. The new platform isn't monetized as effectively as the old one so revenue drops by billions per year - maybe an order of magnitude more than the new product brings in. Shareholders demand an answer as to what management are doing about it.

There might be some golden path, but that typically relies on finding a new market that doesn't interfere with the existing business (e.g. AWS and Amazon). However, the far easier options are a) shutdown the new service or b) increase its monetization, thereby starting the enshitification cycle.

A company that optimizes for efficiency will get stomped flat when the environment changes.

The problem is that there are no incentives in business to optimize for robustness.

Kodak was not actually in a position to be big in digital. And, of course, the digital camera manufacturers mostly got eclipsed by smartphones anyway a decade or so later.

I was at Apple when we worked with engineers from Kodak who were working to change various format standards to allow digital photos. This was in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Even displacing the big Japanese camera manufacturers, who by then had dominated high-end photography, would have required reversing decades of a shift away from high-end cameras like the Retina line.

I don't doubt there was company DNA against digital photography but it's not like non-smartphone photography, especially beyond relatively niche pro/prosumer level, has had such a good run recently either.

Fuji is interesting, they weren't that successful in first digital cameras, but now have some interesting mirrorless ones. They still make film.

And, yes, they have some interesting if somewhat niche cameras.

I'm not a particular Kodak apologist but suggesting that a company should have been able to anticipate and correct for their business collapsing by 90% in a decade or so seems to need a lot of particulars.

Kodak could have spun off a consumer electronics or semiconductor manufacturing company. But it's not clear why that is actually a better model than someone else just spinning up similar entities.

I don't need all the chemical engineers and a lot of other people connected with the old business anyway. And I'm sure not turning them into semiconductor experts.

So you're one of the 10% of employees in HR who snuck through to the other side. Is that really a big deal?

From what I've seen their biggest current challenge is their mailer. Netflix spent a lot of time designing their signature red envelopes, working with the USPS on ensuring they would survive a trip through the postal sorting machines. DVDInBox has yet to reproduce it - their envelopes sometimes arrive fairly mangled, or have not arrived at all (lost to the bowels of the machines).

These years later, while the innovator's dilemma thesis describes what, there's still little treatment of why and how.

I keep wanting someone to account for the roles of investment and finance.

Amazon's innovation was lower cost of capital. They convinced investors to wait for returns. And they got a massive tax holiday. (How could they not succeed?)

Ditto Tesla, with its saavy moves like govt loans, prepurchases, tax incentives, and selling direct.

That cheap capital was necessary, but not sufficient. Both still had to create products customers wanted.

I keep coming back to Apple. How'd Apple avoid the trap? Despite their terrible position. My guess is better financial strategy (if that's the right phrase). Apple focused on margins (and monosophony) instead of market share. And then leveraged their war chest to implement monosphony.

Tesla was very capital efficient compared to how hard the task was, only just enough to get the next product out. By the time they were making big loses, you could see the Model 3 was gone turn around once they reached scale. There was always a clear story of if we do X next, that means Y.

> I keep coming back to Apple. How'd Apple avoid the trap?

I think by changing CEO radically at the right time. Whatever was gone work for Apple, it wasn't any of the typical things you would think off. I'm not at all a Jobs fan, but I don't think many people could have turned it around.

Jobs had the ability to come back and radically shift the company. They also had the benefit of 20 years of loyal costumers, maybe the biggest asset Apple had was their loyal costumer base (or captured market). Personally I can say my dad was a complete Apple fan, he would just buy Apple. He simply didn't care the higher performance or any of the other things.

I have never really said that they where "taken by surprise", but a part of it felt like (from the outside) that management had been a little blinded by their pass success and the profit margins from their workstations combined with no clear path forwards for the whole industry. Nvidia could have very easily been just a curiosity of the past but they managed to strike it lucky standing on the shoulders of others.

If SGI had always been a company that could provide graphics workstations the worked with x86/Windows PC's early for example - maybe they would have fared better. Would have gone with the flow of technology at the time rather than fighting uphill no matter the potential technical brilliance. But being saddled to their MIPS processors and custom OS meant that once people left, they almost never came back. One can have the best tech and still fail.

Yes, but the team that did that also left SGI, then worked directly with Nintendo for the GameCube and are acquired by ATI. I’m not sure how SGI managed to not support that effort within itself.

Integraph started making PCs with high-end graphics at one point, when they abandoned CLIX and gave up on their (Fairchild's, really) Clipper processor. It didn't work for them either. SGI did their own "Visual Workstation" that ran Windows and had a Pentium, but that too was a huge disappointment.

Even for video rendering, if your box is twice as fast, it'll be outcompeted by machines that cost half as much or less. At times my desktop PC was not fast enough, it was simpler to get another PC and run time-consuming things on it while I did other things on the other.

This is even a major point of discussion in the book. The incumbents always see it coming a mile away. They can't respond because doing so breaks their business model. Employees can't go to managers and say, "We need to enter this low-margin market for low-end products." Doing so is a good way to get sidelined or fired.

The "dilemma" is that either traditional option, compete with the upstarts or move further up-market, leads to the same outcome - death.

With money to burn SGI was a childhood brand, legends in 3D. Such wonderful memories. 15k on a desktop setup - it was loose change, however it shows how clueless I was back then. However I'd felt like I'd "arrived".

SGI with Windows NT - lol - I wrote my first OpenGL game in Visual Basic... I've always been somewhat of an outlier ;-) God help me.

The point? My personal experience says something about the strength of the SGI brand - even in the face of what was happening at the time (3DFX and so on - my previous company was one of the few 3DFX api devs - illustrating how clueless I was...)... it all happened so quickly... I'm not surprised SGI couldn't respond - or more importantly understand the strength of Microsoft/OpenGL/DirectX in the boiling pot of 3DFX / Nvidia and the rest... From memory it took three years and SGI was done - shared memory architecture? No longer worth the cost. :-(

Looking back, I was such a kid - a complete fool.

Greybeard advice: bet on the monopoly. Be smart. Brands like SGI are nothing in the face of install base. Think about how crazy it was to spend 15k on a desktop SGI back then... nostalgia is insanity, vanity.

It is wild to think that in games for instance, we went from Quake in 1996 running software rendering to Quake 3 requiring a GPU only 3 years later and that becoming the standard in a matter of months.

From 1991 when I first saw SunOS I wanted a SPARCstation. I started college in 1993 and the school was full of DEC Ultrix machines, Suns, HP PA-RISC, and a handful of IBM RS/6000 and SGIs.

I just thought DOS/Windows PCs were such garbage. Single user, no preemptive, multitasking, no memory protection. Then Linux came out and it changed everything. I bought a PC just to run Linux. My dream of a Unix RISC workstation faded away.

My roommate in 1996 bought a DEC Alpha. Not the cheaper Multia but an Alpha that could run OSF/1 Digital Unix. He actually ran NetBSD on it.

In 1997 I took the computer graphics class and we used SGIs. There was just one lab of them reserved for that class and grad students. I was so excited and it was really cool but I didn't think I could ever afford one. It's still really cool though that you had one.

Price-point, SGI technology was a financially flawed model pertaining to the growing market and more useful than flawed performance of the low cost technology market.

Did anyone at SGI try to simply buy the low tech products, play with them a bit, and see about slowly integrating your tech to make that low tech product just a little better than the competition and cost effect for the market?

Obviously the observation has a confirmation bias.

They were as dead as SGI in the same timeframe.

I remember trying to explain to SGI reps that while we loved the SGI hardware, Linux on commodity x86 was the increasingly more effective choice for our projects. We wanted to buy SGI x86 boxes but they were pushing NT.

It was very apparent that SGI salesmen knew which way the wind was turning and they were milking the last bits of the commission gravy train.

Even when everyone understands “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, the incentives of salesmen and shareholders can be to optimize for extracting value out of the dying company. If I am a shareholder in a company being out innovated, it might make sense to want them to maximize short term profits while reallocating capital to the innovators instead of trying to improve the dying company.

Otherwise you don’t build the iPhone because you don’t want to lose iPod sales.

The iPhone was a high-cost competitor to the iPod. And Apple knew that multi-function devices usually offered poorer user experiences than more focused, (mostly) single-function devices like the iPod. But they still did the iPhone.

"Literally something that should not exist" is the perfect way of putting it. In 1990, lots of people needed boutique workstation vendors. In 2000, nobody did.

Apple abandoned both intel and Nvidia (not to mention AMD/ATI) which is interesting. Apple seems to be vertically integrated like IBM or SGI - but better at differentiation and at locking in new customers.

Apple seems particularly good at differentiated product design; their devices often just look better than the competition and seem to offer a better user experience.

(That being said, SGI's designs look pretty cool too.)

This is conventional wisdom (and thus, usually correct).

However, it's always interesting to look at counterexamples: Beretta, for example (in business for 500 years).

https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

or the IBM PC, which cannibalized IBM's business, at least in IBM's mind. Thus, they screwed it up and let Wintel make the real billions. So it worked, until they took your advice and decided that had to stop.

Is there any significance really to Foot Locker basically being a reorganized Woolworth's as opposed to being a brand-new company?

If you're big enough and have some product lines that still bring in a lot of money and didn't totally collapse like IBM you can sometimes pull it off. But it's hard.

(I tried some early NT graphics cards on a Pentium Pro machine. This was before gamer GPUs; these were pro cards from tiny operations. Fujitsu tried unsuccessfully to get into that business, with a small business unit in Silicon Valley. At one point they loaned me a Fujitsu Sapphire graphics card prototype. When I went back to their office to return it, the office had closed.)

Also, there was a bad real estate deal. SGI owned a lot of land where Google HQ is now. They sold it to Goldman Sachs in a sale and lease-back transaction, selling at the bottom of the market. That land, the area north of US 101 in Mountain View had, and has, a special property tax break. It's the "Shoreline Regional Park Community", set up in 1969. The area used to be a dump. Those hills near Google HQ are piles of trash. So there was a tax deal to get companies to locate there. That made the land especially valuable.

Competitors such as Sun did port their proprietary Unix flavors to the x86 PC platform but never achieved traction. It was impossible to compete with free Linux, and lack of device drivers was always an obstacle.

Then Intel introduced dual core (or maybe just two chips in one housing sharing a bus), and that generated a lot of buzz. So he wrote a follow-up titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".

I don't recall the timing, though, how it related to the timing of asking everyone to read The Innovator's Dilemma. But at least some of the time, there was a pretty deep denial (or at least a pretty deep effort to keep the customers in denial).

I don't know whether this is available online, but I can recommend it as a pleasant programme, with lovely scenery, interesting storylines, and engaging actors.

Intel is basically at its root PC hardware. Yes, it doesn't dominate the entire industry, but memory is pretty key to a PC and the OS that runs on it.

In fundamentally it's another fab product. Like chipsets.

They had the best processor on the market, yet they decided to sell Intel and Windows. I really don't underestand what were they smoking.

More importantly, the things that made Quake III so great were state-of-the-art for gaming. But those things couldn't render lines quickly and well (a mainstay of CAD at the time), or render at very high resolution (which IIRC was 1280x1024 in that era).

Here's what Carmack said abotu the SGIs a few years before: """SGI Infinite reality: ($100000+) Fill rate from hell. Polygons from hell. If you don’t trip up on state changes, nothing will come within shouting distance of this system. You would expect that.""" SGI was also key for map builds before PCs were capable.

But yes, 1999-2000 was just around the cusp of when SGI went from "amazing" to "meh".

It turned out that double precision was a mistake that was sold as a “professional” feature. By sharing edges correctly and using the correct rounding modes, single precision provides pixel-perfect rendering. Efficiencies like this allowed the consumer GPUs to run circles around SGI hardware.

A “budget” SGI card cost more than my parents’ car. I bought three different GPUs by that point with my pocket money.

I’m so sick of dancing around this topic. Managers and business types destroy companies. It never stops. Company after company. How many times do we have to pretend this isn’t the case before we see the truth.

Innovators make things worth selling. Business types drop it on the floor.

SGI's hardware was cutting-edge and exotic. IRIX was killer (sorry Solaris). Cray was a subdivision. My coworkers used emacs, too. They put an O2 on my desk!

The dream didn't last long. Major layoffs hit just a few months after I started full time. I wrote about the experience here: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/

It was a dream company for pretty much every siggraph person at that time. I was in grad school, eagerly awaiting a very popular 3-semester course in computer graphics. It had been devised and taught by a young promising professor who had published some pioneering siggraph papers. I signed up for the course. On the first day of class, the head of the department walked in and said the professor had been recruited by his dream company SGI for an ungodly sum of money to work on some Jewish director’s movie about a dinosaur themepark. I thought ok, whatever, someone else will teach the course. The bastards scrapped the entire 3 series computer graphics module because there wasn’t anyone else who could teach that. So we had to pick from one of the usual dumb options - databases, OS, Networks, Compilers. Since then I’ve always held a grudge against sgi.

I assume you mean Steven Spielberg and one of the Jurassic Park films?

If so, why can't you just say so? Why are you referring to Steven Spielberg, one of the most famous directors of all time, as "some Jewish director?" Do you think people won't recognize the name? I promise people know who Steven Spielberg is.

Based on the comment, it sounds like that's the way the head of the department phrased it.

Presumably the department head didn't know the title as it hadn't been released yet.

Those buildings represented that change to me. I can remember coming to concerts at the Shoreline in the 90s and looking at those Silicon Graphics buildings: they looked so cool, and they represented the cutting edge of technology (at the time). And yet...it all disappeared.

Same goes for the Sun campus which is where Meta/Facebook is now. Famously, the Facebook entrance sign is literally the same old Sun sign, just turned around! [0]

So I always cautioned co-workers: this too, shall pass. Even Google.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...

Great memento mori.

This was their downfall, trying to scale out adoption with esoteric hardware.

I remember being quoted $18k ish for memory upgrade on a O2 or origin, same amount of memory I had just bought for $500 for an intel Linux box at home.

Sure, it wasn’t apples to apples, but I remember thinking very clearly that this wasn’t going to end well for SGI.

Is there at least some truthiness to it? Or has this just become Silicon Valley urban legend in my head?

(With apologies for reviving 90s IRIX/Solaris snark in my earlier post. :-)

Driving to a Phish show at Shoreline, we passed the low-slung office buildings of SGI which seemed like the sexiest place to work. When I graduated, I thought I was "too dumb in CS" to get a job in Mountain View and went to grad school in biophysics instead.

By the time I was a few years into grad school, I worked in a computer graphics lab outfitted with Reality Monsters and Octanes and other high end SGIs (when you maxxed out an SGI's graphics and RAM, they were really fast). I was porting molecular graphics code to Linux using Mesa (much to the derision of the SGI fans in the lab). When we got a FireGL2 card it had a linux driver and could do reasonable molecular graphics in real time and the SGI folks looked real scared (especially because the SGI Visual Workstation had just come out and was a very expensive turkey).

Less than a decade after that I was working in those very buildings for Google. Google took over SGI's old HQ (Jeff Dean told me there was a period where Google and SGI overlapped in the GooglePlex and the SGI folks looked very sad as they paid for their lunches and teh googlers got free food). There was still plenty of SGI signage strewn about. And now Google has gone dumb and also built their own HQ next door (note the correlation between large SV companies building overly fancy HQs and then going out of business).

Such is the cycle of sexy tech.

I started with Unix on a Personal IRIS as an undergrad working in a physics lab which used it for imaging capture and analysis. I was the nominal sys admin, with one semester of Minix under my belt and just enough to be dangerous. (I once removed /bin/cc because I thought it was possible to undelete, like on DOS. I had to ask around the meteorology department for a restore tape.)

The summer before grad school I got a job at the local supercomputing center to work on a parallelization of CHARMm, using PVM. I developed it on that PI, and on a NeXT. That's also when I learned about people at my future grad school working on VR for molecular visualization, in a 1992 CACM article. So when I started looking for an advisor, that's the lab I chose, and I became the junior co-author and eventual lead developer of VMD.

With a Crimson as my desktop machine, a lab full of SGIs and NeXTs, and the CAVE VR setup elsewhere in the building. Heady times.

I visited SGI in 1995 or so, on holiday, thinking that would be a great place to work. They even had an Inventor plugin for molecular visualization, so I thought it would be a good lead. I emailed and got an invited to visit, where the host kindly told me that they were not going to do more in molecular visualization because they wanted to provide the hardware everyone uses, and not compete in that software space.

In the early 1990s SGIs dominated molecular modeling (replacing Evans & Sutherland), so naturally the related tools, like molecular dynamics codes, also ran on them. But we started migrating to distributed computing, where it didn't make sense to have 16 expensive SGIs, leaving them more as the head .. which as you pointed out, was soon able to run just fine on a Linux machine.

We were a couple of physics grad students working on a side project in late 1993. My background was a semester course based on Foley & van Dam. Hardware gave us a 5-10 year lead over what we could have done with consumer tech.

There wasn't really a "rest of CG". Only the highest-end SGI machines at the time had hardware texture mapping - most did it in software (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Graphics).

We aren't talking 2D organo-chem hexagons, but 3D spheres and cylinders. Back around 1995 I posted some benchmarks to Usenet about the different approaches I tried (including NURBS), but I can no longer find a copy of it.

The straight-forward way is to render the spheres as a bunch of triangles, so, what, 50 polygons per sphere? Times 100,000 spheres = 5 million polygons. That was large for the time, but doable. Plus, during movement we used a lower level of detail.

What was Quake's polygon count?

Oh, and we're displaying animated molecules, including interacting with a live physics simulation, so no pre-computed BSP either.

Rastering spheres quickly on a PC was also possible then, which was RasMol's forte, but it was flat compared to having a couple hardware-based point lights plus ambient lighting.

Interestingly, AutoCAD (RIP Walker) tried to get into molecular modeling, but it didn't work out. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_82.html

Later on, I was able to do some computational work on an Altix 3700 with 256 sockets and 512G of RAM spread over four full-height cabinets with the nest of NUMAlink cables at the back), at the time running SuSE linux and that was wild seeing the 256 sockets being printed out with a cat /proc/cpuinfo. Now the same capabilities are available in a 4U machine.

The corporate lineage story is also just as interesting as the hardware they made as well. Acquisition, spinoff, acquisition, rename, acqusition, shutter, now perhaps just a few books and binders and memories in the few remaining personnal at HPE are all that's left (via Cray, via Tera, via SGI, via Cray Research).

RIP SGI

One day, someone wheeled this approx. 3x3 foot sized box to my door and asked me if I wanted it. It was a SGI Onyx with a giant monitor sitting on top, with a keyboard and mouse.

I plugged it in and it sounded like an airplane taking off. It immediately heated up my entire tiny office. It was the 4th Unix I had ever played with (Ultrix, NeXT and A/UX were previous ones). It had some cool games on it, but beyond that, at the time, I had no use for it because A/UX on my Quadra950, was so much more fun to play with.

I don't even think I ever opened it up to look at it. I don't know what I was thinking. lol.

After realizing it did not have much going for it, I ended up just turning it on when the office was cold and using it as a foot rest.

Oh yea, found a video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA

Regarding computing cycles, boom/bust, I recently re-read Soul of New Machine and was struck by how much the world has NOT changed. Sure we're not talking about micro/mini-computers and writing micro-coded assembly but the whole "the market is pivoting and we need to ride this wave" and "work like a dog to meet some almost unobtainum goal" seems to still underpin being an engineer in "tech" today.

SGI also never had a presence in business critical applications which gave some of the other vendors more momentum (HP-UX/PA-RISC, VMS/Alpha, Solaris/SPARC).

For team building, we launched potato canons into NASA Moffet field, blew up or melted Sun machines for fun with thermite and explosives. Lots of amazing people and fond memories for a kid getting started.

Why did they cancel it, money running out? It’s sad to think they were close to a new architecture but then just kept selling IR for years (and even sold a FireGL-based “Onyx” by the end).

Also was it a separate team working on the lower-end graphics like VPro/Odyssey?

Yes there were separate teams working on the lower-end graphics.

Later the large Altix NUMA systems with core counts in unprecedented sizes (and problems booting due to lock contention ;)

And of course their donation of the XFS filesystem to the linux world!

As an outsider--cause I didn't live and work in California--this was the go-go atmosphere of such companies back then where they thought they could do no wrong. And the after work parties were wild (how the heck do you break off half a toilet bowl?).

One of the buildings had plastic over the windows cause that's where they were working on the plugin GL card for the PC. (Ssh! No one's supposed to know that!)

Being the first system engineer in St Louis, my eyes lit up when my manager told me he had ordered an 16-core machine for my office--just for me!

I was hired as a video expert. The company re-org'ed and my new boss decided he needed a Fortran expert so that was the end of my job with SGI.

I remember the colors as being very different, from the photos, though.

The Personal Iris was a deep purplish-brown, and the Indigo was ... indigo.

Jim Clark sounds like my kinda guy. I made a hash of my teenage years, and barely squeaked in, with a GED, myself. It has all worked out, OK, in the end, though.

When I was in high school we had a lab full of SGI machines. They also never got used. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing equipment, and probably that much again in software licenses (at the commercial rate), just sitting there doing nothing. It was heartbreaking.

On a happy note, the SGI bus (a semi-trailer full of SGI machines demoing their capabilities) came to school one time. As a teenage nerd, getting to play with a refrigerator-sized Onyx2 was a good day.

There were all kinds of toys, though. There was a dedicated classroom setup for video-based remote learning some 30 years before COVID - that got used for one semester, from what I gather (was never used while I was there). The school was even host to a dialup ISP at one point.

The administrators were all in on technology. The teachers, not so much...

Eventually, in my last year, the government changed the funding model and the party ended.

Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers.

Irix was a really cool OS, and 4Dwm was pretty nice to use and play with. It makes me sad that they beaten by Apple.

There was a window in the mid-90s where it would have been possible for SGI to develop a PC 3D accelerator for the consumer market using their GE technology, but nobody in the C-Suite had the stomach to make a new product that would undercut the enormous profit margins on their core product. It's the classic corporate trap. Missing out on the next big thing because you can't see past next quarter's numbers. Imagine basically an N64 on a PCI card for $150 in 1996. The launch versions could be bundled with a fully accelerated version of Quake. The market would have exploded.

Worked at a university in the early 90s.

Maybe irix was okay to use if you were just sitting in front of it doing rando user / graphics things, but administering it was unbearable. The license fees to get OS updates were exorbitant; you'd have to get wacky new licenses to enable NFS or NIS and you'd need new kernels for just about anything.

As far as I could tell they were a cursed company that hated their users. "Here's a pretty thing that does one thing well but is otherwise insane and will ruin you when you need it most."

Good riddance.

Amiga was only better 1985-1988.

I still have my original Amiga and A2000. I was an Amiga user for a decade. They were very good. I was platform agnostic, caring only to get work done as quickly and easily as possible so I was also an early Macintosh user as well as Sun and PA-RISC. And yes, I still have all of those dinosaurs too.

By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back.

But by 1988 the PS/2 with a 386 and VGA was out and the A2000 was shipping with a 7MHz 68000 and ECS.

By 1990 the 486s were on the market and Macs were shipping with faster 030s and could be equipped with NuBUS graphics cards that made Amiga graphics modes look like decelerated CGA.

After the A2000 the writing was on the wall.

Note: my perspective is of someone who has always used computers to do work, with ALMOST no care for video games so all of the blitter magic of Amiga was irrelevant to me. That being said when DOOM came out I bought a PC and rarely used my Amigas again.

What I can confidently assert is that I upgraded my A2000 many times and ran into the absolute configuration nightmare that is the Amiga architecture and the problems with grafting upgrades onto a complex system with multiple tiers of RAM and close OS integration with custom chips.

One more bit of heresy is that I always considered Sun's platform to be superior to SGI's.

By the early 90's the Amiga just wasn't competitive. The chip set barely evolved since 1985. ECS barely added anything over the original chip set. By around 1992 or 1993, 386 systems with SVGA and Soundblaster cards were cheap. Amiga AGA was too little, too late. Also consider the low end AGA system (Amiga 1200) was totally crippled with only 2 megs of slow "chip" RAM.

I was an Amiga fan until 1993. Started with an A500, then A3000. Eventually I moved on to a 486 clone w/Linux. Later on I had a Sun SparcStation 10 at home, so I agree with you on Sun and SGI.

Oh indubitably! I don't think even the most committed Amiga fan, even the ones that speculate about alternate histories, would deny that at all.

The thing is, though, that only happened because Commodore essentially decided that since it had so much of a head start, it could just rest on its laurels and not really innovate or improve anything substantially, instead of constantly pushing forward like all of its competitors would do, and so eventually the linear or even exponential curve of other hardware manufacturers' improvements outpaced its essentially flat improvement curve. So it doesn't seem like IBM PCs and eventually even Macs outpacing the power of Amiga Hardware was inevitable or inherent from the start.

If they had instead continued to push their lead — actually stuck with the advanced Amiga chips that they were working on before it was canceled and replaced with ECS for instance — I certainly see the possibility of them keeping up with other hardware, and eventually transitioning to 3D acceleration chips instead of 2D acceleration chips when that happened in the console world, eventually perhaps even leading to the Amiga line being the first workstation line to have the gpus, and further cementing their lead, while maintaining everything that made Amiga great.

Speculating even further, as we are seeing currently with the Apple M-series having a computer architecture that is composed of a ton of custom made special purpose chips is actually an extremely effective way of doing things; what if Amiga still existed in this day and age and had a head start in that direction, a platform with a history of being extremely open and well documented and extensible being the first to do this kind of architecture, instead of it being Apple?

Of course there may have been fundamental technical flaws with the Amiga approach that made it unable to keep up with other hardware even if Commodore had had the will; I have seen some decent arguments to that effect, namely that since it was using custom vendor-specific hardware instead of commodity hardware that was used by everyone, they couldn't take advantage of the cross-vendor compatibility like IBM PCs, could and also couldn't take advantage of economies of scale like Intel could, but who knows!

The company was going to shit after the Amiga launched, it took a competent manager to save the company and turn the Amiga around into a moderate success.

Commodore didn't really have money to keep up chip development. They had their fab they would have need to upgrade that as well, or drop it somehow.

Another example of that is the Acorn Archimedes. Absolutely fucking incredibly hardware for the price. Like crushing everything in price vs performance. But ... literally launched with a de-novo operating system with 0 applications. And its was a small company in Britain.

The dream scenario is for Sun to realize that they should build a low cost all costume chip device. They had the margin on the higher end business to support such a development for 2-3 generations and to get most software ported to it. They also had the software skill to make the hardware/software in a way that would allow future upgrades.

I don't know what Sun had planned for this tech.

A even more interesting approach for Sun would have been to cooperate or acquire Acorn. The Acorn Archimedes was an almost perfect low end work station product. Its incredible weakness was its lack of OS and it total lack of applications.

Acorn spend an absolutely absurd amount of money to try to get the OS and application on the platform. They spend 3 years developing an new OS, and then realized that this was going nowhere. So they rushed out another new OS. And then they realized that nobody want to buy a machine with a compromise OS and no application. So they had to put up huge effort to try to fix that. The company simply couldn't sustain that kind of effort on the Software side while at the same time building new processors and new machines. Its surprising what they achieved but it wasn't a good strategy.

Had they just adopted SunOS (BSD) it would have been infinitely better for them. And for Sun to release new high and and low end RISC workstations at the same time would have been an absolute bomb in the market.

Even if you added all the bells and whistles to the system (Ethernet, SCSI, extra RAM), you could be very low priced and absolutely blow pretty much every other system out of the water.

Re Acorn though — As much better from a market perspective as buying Acorn and releasing RISC- and BSD-based low-end workstations might have been for Sun, I still prefer to imagine a world where the Amiga's unique hardware and software got to live on — perhaps with compatibility layers to run Sun software, but nevertheless preserving a UNIX-like but still non-UNIX OS lineage and non-generic-PC hardware lineage.

My first PC was acquired in 1992, and still only had a lousy beeper, on a 386SX.

Chip ram, fast ram, cpu ram, expansion board ram, or slow ram? Did too much ram force your zorro card into the slooooooooooow ram address space (mine did)? Tough cookies bucko!

Macintosh, pounding on table: "RAM is RAM!"

In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems.

One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.

In my opinion, Mesa played a more significant role because it first allowed people to port OpenGL software to run on software-only cheap systems running Linux, and later provided the framework for full OpenGL implementations coupled with hardware acceleration.

Of course, I still greatly enjoyed running Quake on Windows on my 3dfx card with OpenGL.

How is that in anyway different from Apple today with it's ARM SoCs, soldered SSDs and an OS that requires "entitlements" from Apple to "unlock" features and develop on?

There is no way to do this for an IBM z16, which is the kind of vendor lock in that people are saying Apple doesn’t have.

I think you highlighted very correctly there, though, why SGI lost. It turned out there were cheaper options, which while not on par with SGI workstations initially, just improved at a faster rate than SGI and eventually ended up with a much better cost/functionality profile. I feel like SGI just bet wrong. The article talks about how they acquired Cray, which were originally these awesome supercomputers. But it turned out supercomputers essentially got replaced by giant networks of much lower cost PCs.

What smaller businesses are using will tend to be what takes over in the future, just due to natural processes. When smaller businesses grow, they would generally prefer to fund the concurrent growth of existing vendors that they like using than they are to switch to the existing "industrial-grade" vendor.

At the same time, larger organizations that can afford to start with the industrial-grade vendors are only as loyal as they are locked in.

So in 20 years in, the current batch of senior devs will be retiring, and the current noobies will have become senior devs.

*Whatever language is easy to learn today will be a big deal in 20 years*

That's how PHP, Python, and JavaScript won. Since JavaScript got so much money poured on it to make it fast, secure, easy, with a big ecosystem, I say JS (or at least TS) will still be a big deal in 20 years.

The latest batch of languages know this, and that's why there are no big minimal languages. Rust comes with a good package manager, unit tester, linter, self-updater, etc., because a language with friction for noobies will simply die off.

One might ask how we got stuck with the languages of script kiddies and custom animated mouse cursors for websites. There's no other way it could turn out, that's just how people learn languages.

My take: that’s just fine. Tightly crafted code is not a lost art, and is in fact getting easier to write these days. You’re just not forced into scrabbling for every last byte and cpu cycle anymore just to get acceptable results.

But I think you're broadly right.

[1] Yes I know about OpenFOAM, I know I could use that if I really wanted.

I guess it's just kind of impossible to predict the future. I don't think it's an incompetent decision to try and focus entirely on the workstation world; there are lots of businesses that make no attempt to market to consumers, and only market to large companies/organizations, since the way budgeting works with big companies is sort of categorically different than consumer budgets.

But you're absolutely right. Apple and Windows computers just kept getting better and better, faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, as did 3D modeling and video editing software for them. I mean, hell, as a 12 year old kid in 2003, I had both Lightwave 3D (student license) and Screenblast Movie Studio (now Vegas) running on my cheap, low-spec desktop computer, and it was running fast enough to be useful (at least for standard definition).

I think a more useful explanation is that people rate the value of avoiding vendor lockin extraordinarily high, to the extent that people will happily pick worse technology if there's at least two competing vendors to choose from. The IBM PCs were not good, but for convoluted legal reasons related to screwups by IBM their tech became a competitive ecosystem. Bad for IBM, good for everyone else. Their competitors did not make that "mistake" and so became less preferred.

Microsoft won for a while despite being single vendor because the alternative was UNIX, which was at least sorta multi-vendor at the OS level, except that portability between UNIXen was ropey at best in the 90s and of course you traded software lockin for hardware lockin; not really an improvement. Combined with the much more expensive hardware, lack of gaming and terrible UI toolkits (of which Microsoft was the undisputed master in the 90s) and then later Linux, and that was goodbye to them.

Of course after a decade of the Windows monopoly everyone was looking for a way out and settled on abusing an interactive document format, as it was the nearest thing lying around that was a non-Microsoft specific way to display UI. And browsers were also a competitive ecosystem so a double win. HTML based UIs totally sucked for the end users, but .... multi-vendor is worth more than nice UI, so, it wins.

See also how Android wiped out every other mobile OS except iOS (nobody cares much about lockin for mobile apps, the value of them is just not high enough).

When you switched to Intel in 1992, PC's had already existed since 1981. PC's didn't wipe out most other home computers overnight.

When these RISC-based workstations were initially released their performance, especially at graphics, was well beyond what a PC could do, and justified their high prices. A "workstation" was in a class by itself, and helped establish the RISC mystique.

However, eventually Intel caught up with the performance, at a lower price, and that was pretty much the end. Sun lived on for a while based on their OS and software ecosystem, but eventually that was not enough especially with the advent of Linux, GCC, etc, as a free alternative.

[1] http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html

Sun Microsystems was a company like no other. The last of a dying breed of "family" technology companies.

There were times when Java ran better on Intel than on Solaris.

As much as I loved my O2 (my first professional computer), it was underpowered for the time for anything other than texture manipulation. The closed source nature of that time period and the hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers on top of already very expensive hardware. The Cray-linked Origin 200's ran Netscape web server with ease but that's a lot of hardware in a time period when everything went out of date very quickly-donated ours! Irix still looks better than the new Mac OS UIs IMO but no-Motif is a small price to pay for far cheaper access to SDKs IMO. Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature. https://insecure.org/sploits_irix.html

For Fortran? My memory is hazy but at NASA NAS a bunch of us were using gcc/g++ starting ~1990. g++ was... an adventure. Building my own (fine!) compiler for free(!) got me hooked on OSS to the point that when Linux/FreeBSD launched I jumped in as fast as I could.

I really loved my various SGI boxen. Magical times. I was a NASA "manager" so had the Macintosh "manager" interface box that I solved by keeping it turned off.

The Fibre Channel XIO boards were really needed back then for that application as PCI was still way too slow.

I was sad to know that when I left that job that SGI server was being replaced and the support personal at SGI were going to lose their jobs too.

That was in addition to having three default accounts with well known passwords and a telnet server.

Oracle threatened to not support us when I used an unprivileged Xvfb instqance instead.

Still stupid but not that uncommon back then.

They leapt out ahead of the competition with an advanced OS, purpose-built for graphics and sound in a way that PCs and Macs weren't.

Which was great. But they weren't really better than the competition. They were just doing something the competition wasn't. And when the competition actually started doing those things they got eclipsed in a hurry.

I wonder if Tesla will suffer the same fate. They were obviously around a decade ahead of the established players when it came to electric cars. But once the other established players actually got serious about electric cars, Tesla largely stopped being special, and upstarts like Lucid and Rivian are neck and neck with them (in terms of compelling products, not sales) as well.

This means there are products out there with futuristic features that will be seen as requirements for all things going forward and right now those features are niche elements of some product.

The Amiga was a fantastic device but not a general purpose device. Lots of things are fantastic at a niche but not general, and those almost always fail.

Is this also the "worse is better" truism?

I don’t know anyone at Rivian so my opinion of them is neutral. Meanwhile Tesla is run by the jackass who ruined twitter.

See the dominance of Threadripper in workstations, which is built on top of mainstream desktop and server parts bin. Or look at the Epyc based supercomputers, rumored to be the only supercomputers to turn a net profit for the suppliers, thanks to leveraging a lot of existing IP.

Along the same lines, there is an alternate timeline where the Sharp X68000 took over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OepeiBF5Jnk

Yeah, I think that would also have been a better timeline; I'm just stuck in the anglo-world and thus my knowledge is mostly limited to what was released in the US or Europe.

At the time. A brief moment in time, and then they had no path forward and were rapidly steamrolled. Nothing was "chosen wrong" in this aspect.

There's other stuff too; they had better color graphics in the 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware. Even by 1990, the video toaster was released, well before it got any port to DOS.

[1] I'm sure it got better, my first exposure to it was System 7 and that thing was an unholy mess. I didn't touch macOS again until OS X.

> 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware.

And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting?

> Even by 1990, the video toaster was released,

And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform.

Also, I don't buy into the idea that just because a company had something "superior" for a short period of time with no further company direction that they didn't lose fair and square. That Amiga had something cool in the 80s but didn't or couldn't evolve isn't because the market "chose wrong". Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run. Suffering a few more years with the occasional bomb on System 7 was not a market failure.

> Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking

What was bizarre about it, compared to any other cooperative multitasking system of the time? Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.

Yeah fair. I do wonder if a port like the SNES version would have been possible if id would have greenlit it, but that's a "what if" universe. Alien Breed 3D would run on a 1200, but IIRC it ran pretty poorly on that.

> And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting?

I mean, yes, VGA cards and Soundblaster cards were around in 1990, but they weren't really standard for several years later.

> And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform.

Also fair. I'll acknowledge my view is a bit myopic, since I don't really do CAD or desktop publishing, but I do some occasional video editing, and I do think Amigas were quite impressive on that front. You're right in saying it was a "niche" though.

> Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run.

No argument here. Still think that the hardware was pretty cool though.

> What was bizarre about it

I guess "bizarre" was the wrong word. It was just really really unstable, and System 7 would constantly freeze for seemingly no reason and I hated it.

> Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.

I feel like if Commodore had been competently run, they could have done work to get proper protected memory support, but again that's of course a "what if" universe that we can't really know for sure.

I guess what frustrates me is that it did genuinely feel like Commodore was really ahead of the curve. I think the fact that they had something pretty advanced like preemptive multitasking (edit: fixed typo) in the mid 80s was a solid core to build on, and I do kind of wish it had caught on and iterated. I see no reason why the Amiga couldn't have eventually gotten decent CAD and Desktop publishing software. I think Commodore didn't think they had to keep growing.

But the reality is the Commodore 64 kept Commodore going during most of that period rather than Amiga sales. It's similar to Apple where the Apple 2 kept Apple afloat during the 80s and 90s until Steve returned.

By the late 80s the "microcomputer" hobby/games market was dead and systems like the ST and Amiga (or Acorn Archimedes, etc.) were anachronisms. You had to be a PC-compat or a Mac or a Unix workstation or you were dead. Commodore and Atari both tried to push themselves into that workstation tier by selling cheaper 68030 machines than Sun, etc, but without success.

This is I think the premise that you and people like me who think Amiga could have gone on to do great things disagree on, I think. Most Amiga fans would say that it totally had a path forward, or at least there is no evidence that it didn't, and the failure to follow that path therefore it wasn't an inherent technical problem, but a problem of politics and management. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

By '97 or so SGI actually had essentially given up competing when they shut down the team that was developing the successor to InfiniteReality.

In a sense though, Silicon Graphics did become more standard, in that their original 3D framework was Iris GL, which then evolved into OpenGL, which became the main 3D graphics standard for many years.

What happened was Intel, they took great decisions like automating the design of their processors and this made them grow at an incredible pace. The Amiga depended on a different processor that stagnated.

Regarding Windows, some time reading the excellent Windows Internals book series is recommended.

I used it for a while earlier at work, and don't remember many problems with it. One did have to apply OS patches fairly regularly to it, but IIRC, that process was somewhat smooth.

I think it's a combination of a skillset/culture needed to create a paradigm shift isn't the same one needed to compete with others on a playing field you built, and of complacency. It happens over an over. We saw it happen with RIM, and we're watching it happen right now with Prusa Research.

The Saturn 5 was clearly a technical marvel better than any plane, and it'd get you anywhere much faster.

If you spare no expense, you get a better product. Sure. I'm also not surprised that a $100k BMW is more comfortable than a Renault Clio.