[rescue] UnOracle patches for Solaris

[Andrew Jones]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 09:06:36PM -0400, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> 
> Then they wasted a bunch of engineering time on NT, when they could have
> been putting all the wood behind one arrow in the form of IRIX.
> 
> Then they retreated to the high end, when their knockout hit was the
> modestly price Indy, which served as an excellent way to get people
> familiar with SGI.
> 

By the mid-90s, server revenue was more than 50% of SGI's business.  Their
knockout hits were the Challenge L and the Origin 2000.  The O2k in particular
was a full decade ahead of the state of the art, challenging supercomputer 
vendors head-on with a single system image running a standard UNIX.

The Indy was cute, but it was way too little, way too late.  The stripper 
model was about $5k, and it could just barely run IRIX.  Booting into the
window system was a 30 minute swap festival in the base configuration.  

Meanwhile, you could go buy a $5k PC and watch Windows 3.0 *fly*.  Full color
on your SGI was thousands of dollars.  16b color on your PC was a $300 Diamond
board.

Execrable systems like the Indy and the SparcStation 1 put the first nails
in the workstation coffin.  They were the proof that the UNIX vendors just
weren't ready to compete with commodity systems.

Finally, in the late 90s, riding the wave of successful MIPS systems, SGI
made a conscious decision to move away from IRIX/MIPS.  Linux, NT, and
Itanium were the future. IIRC, By the time Linux/ia64 revenue actually
outweighed IRIX/MIPS, SGI had already gone bankrupt once.