[CyberMonkey]

A thread just for the fun of it:

What year do you think SGI's heyday was?

"Heyday" being defined as "the period of a person's or thing's greatest success, popularity, activity, or vigour."

[GeekLucanis]

Probably gonna guess somewhere between 92 and 95. When the Indy and Onyx1 came out.

[Irinikus]

Apparently Silicon Graphics was the farthest ahead of the competition during the era when they released the original Octane. By the time the Octane2 came around they were already starting to loose ground.

[jan-jaap]

Everything before the Indigo (1991), so the IRISes and 4D series, was maybe groundbreaking, but also rather niche.

Around 1997 saw the Pentium Pro, Windows NT 4 and early Quadro and FireGL cards (and a bunch of others I forgot). The CAD/CAE people I knew went from Pro/E on Indigo2 R10K to Windows on x86 or Alpha. IMHO, that was the start of the retreat to the high end of the market for MIPS/IRIX. We all know how that ended...

So my vote is 1991...1997

As far as technology goes, this period also includes the release of the pinnacle of high-end SGI graphics: InfiniteReality. Sure, there were speed bumps and RAM upgrades afterwards, but the basics, introduced in 1996, never changed

[Trippynet]

Quadro didn't come along until 2000, but I'd say from around 1990ish to early 1997 was the heyday. The 3dfx Voodoo, plus Nvidia's early 3D cards came along from late 1996 onwards. Along with Windows NT and the Pentium Pro, it showed that you could do reasonable 3D work on Wintel machines for a fraction of the price of SGI systems.

SGIs slide started shortly after this and led to Ed McCracken being fired as CEO in late 1997. Then of course was Belluzzo's disastrous reign from 1998 to 1999 in which SGI effectively binned the majority of their 3D team by settling with NVidia and transferring most of their 3D engineers over there. After that, SGI's fate was pretty much sealed. Quadro and GeForce were (I believe) developed considerably by ex-SGI engineers.

[Fascia]

Mid 90s, when they were riding high in terms of stock price and innovation. The O2 was the peak for innovation on the desktop. It was something genuinely revolutionary and did amazing new things. Desktop releases thereafter had architectural improvements, but each one just felt iterative over the last. I love my Tezro, but as a user it feels just like a beefier version of what SGI had released nearly a decade earlier.

I really hate to blame the Visual Workstations, but effectively trying to focus on two competing products lines really felt like each got half the attention they needed. Why invest in MIPS when it looks like SGI might be abandoning it? Why invest in their Intel line when it seems like SGI isn't willing to go all in on it, when competitors are?

So yeah, mid 90s for sure.