@flexion They had so many incredibly smart people there. Really easy to be overawed by the experience of pretty much everyone around you.

The company made a massive strategic error by getting behind Windows on Intel workstations. Until then, they were arguably one of a small number of companies that the US Govt would never permit to go bankrupt, because as one of the small number of domestic supercomputer manufacturers the spooks would always need them for signals intelligence analysis, and DoE would always need them to run nuclear simulations after the START treaty meant they couldn’t do live detonations anymore.

Ownership of MIPS meant they had their own in-house CPU architecture and fab capability. It was basically them, Cray and IBM, but IBM sucked in the 1990s and SGI bought Cray, so for a while there they were the only game in town.

But once they lost focus on that, they became basically just another generic PC company selling hardware to run rendering software for Hollywood, and they died on the vine as high performance computing shifted to large arrays of Linux boxes.

Origin architecture was cool though. Everyone with an Onyx secretly wanted a 9-rack Origin 2000 upgrade :)