SGI is standing down Irix and MIPS architectures. Likely one of the harder decisions they have had to make, these would not have been selling much as of late. MIPS was hopelessly long in the tooth, and Irix, while one of the better Unixen out there (IMO), was closely tied to MIPS.
In the end Irix could not keep and continue to attract applications. When this happens enough, your platform becomes less desireable. Similar things are happening to other *nix today.
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Just like every other platform. It’s always the apps.
As someone who graduated from Berkeley (in CS) in the early 90s, I think I’ll always think of SGI machines as super high powered, and just plain super cool. Then again, I haven’t worked on one since I graduated, so I guess that’s an indicator of how they’ve waned.
Still, nostalgically speaking, I hope that SGI can find its way.
[...] Scalability.org is one of my favorite blogs. Joe Landman is opinionated and knowledgable, a perfect combination for good blogging. He has a lot to say about the demise of SGI and recently he blogged about the company ending IRIX and MIPS. Back in the day IRIX used to be my favorite *NIX distribution. Very stable, easy to use, and oh the graphics. Come to think of it, I should have ackownledged the company in my dissertation, a lot of which was done on two trusty SGI Octanes. They were wonderful machines [...]