SGI

Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) was an American technology company known for pioneering high-end graphics hardware and visualization software. Founded in 1981 by Jim Clark and others, SGI produced workstation and server systems that integrated powerful MIPS-based processors with advanced graphics pipelines. Its products and software were widely used in animation, scientific visualization, virtual prototyping, and film production.

The company’s early success came with the IRIS line of graphics workstations, running the IRIX Unix operating system. Subsequent generations, including Indigo, Indigo2, Origin, Onyx, and the Infinite Reality graphics subsystems, targeted different markets from desktop visualization to supercomputing. SGI's hardware was notable for scalable multiprocessor architectures and high-performance graphics rendering capabilities.

SGI played a key role in shaping graphics software; in 1992 the company co-developed the OpenGL API, which became an industry-standard cross-platform graphics interface. This helped SGI software and hardware influence a broad ecosystem of applications beyond SGI machines.

Facing competition and market shifts in the 2000s, SGI filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006. Its assets were acquired by Rackable Systems, which renamed itself SGI in 2009. Hewlett Packard Enterprise later acquired SGI in 2016, integrating its HPC and visualization offerings into its enterprise portfolio.

Legacy: SGI's innovations in graphics hardware, parallel processing, and the OpenGL standard left a lasting imprint on professional visualization, the film industry, and high-performance computing.