Silicon Graphics (SGI)

For most of the 1980s and 1990s, if a scientist, an engineer or a film studio needed fast 3D graphics, it bought a Silicon Graphics machine. The company built powerful workstations and later supercomputers, wrapped in bright, distinctive cases. It grew from a chip designed at Stanford and a group of Stanford students who followed their professor into business.

Silicon Graphics, later known as SGI, was never a Palo Alto company. It lived in Mountain View, a short drive down the Bayshore Freeway. Its Stanford roots are clear, though. Its buildings still shape what visitors see in the area today. This profile relies on Stanford Engineering's account, Wikipedia and the company's documented history.

The Geometry Engine at Stanford

Drawing a 3D object on a screen takes a huge number of repetitive calculations. Every point has to be rotated, scaled and projected, many times a second. In the early 1980s general-purpose computers did that work slowly.

Jim Clark was an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. With Marc Hannah he designed a chip to do it in hardware. They called it the Geometry Engine. Stanford Engineering describes it as an early example of very large scale integration, or VLSI, applied to graphics processing. The work was done under a contract from ARPA, the Defense Department's research agency.

The idea was simple and powerful. Put the most demanding part of the graphics pipeline on a dedicated chip and an ordinary workstation could draw 3D scenes in real time. That is the same logic behind the graphics processors found in every phone and gaming PC today.

Founding the company

Stanford Engineering says Clark and Hannah co-founded Silicon Graphics in 1981. Wikipedia gives the founding date as November 9, 1981, in Mountain View. It says Clark left his Stanford position to start the company. He brought a team of graduate students and research staff from Stanford with him:

• Kurt Akeley
• David J. Brown
• Tom Davis
• Marc Hannah
• Herb Kuta
• Mark Grossman
• Rocky Rhodes

Abbey Silverstone and a few others joined them. The first machines used a CPU board that was a variant of the board designed for Stanford's SUN workstation, the same board that launched Sun Microsystems a few months later. Two of the most important Peninsula computer companies of the 1980s therefore shared a Stanford parts list.

Growth under Ed McCracken

Ed McCracken became chief executive in 1984 and ran the company until 1997. Over those years annual revenue grew from $5.4 million to $3.7 billion, according to Wikipedia. Silicon Graphics systems dominated high-speed 3D rendering, a market that larger rivals such as IBM and Sun largely avoided.

The company's customers included engineering firms designing cars and aircraft, scientists modeling molecules and weather, government research labs and Hollywood effects studios. In 1992 it bought MIPS Computer Systems, the chip company built on Stanford professor John Hennessy's processor research. That gave it control of the processors inside its machines. Stanford's engineering displays include both the MIPS chip and the Geometry Engine among their landmark Stanford-linked technologies.

Its workstations ran IRIX, the company's own version of the Unix operating system. That combination of MIPS processors, custom graphics hardware and IRIX defined the brand for two decades. SGI announced the end of MIPS and IRIX development on September 6, 2006. Support for those products ended after December 2013.

Jim Clark's next act

Clark left Silicon Graphics in early 1994 and co-founded Netscape with Marc Andreessen in 1994. Netscape's browser opened the web to ordinary users and helped set off the dot-com boom. Its rise is covered in our dot-com era page. That makes Clark one of very few people to start two companies that each changed the industry.

Decline and two bankruptcies

By the late 1990s ordinary PCs with add-in graphics cards could do much of what an expensive SGI workstation did. Clusters of cheap Linux machines started taking on supercomputer work. SGI's own software, including the 3D animation program Maya, was ported to Windows and Linux, which made the company's hardware less necessary.

The company tried several fixes. Most failed. It sold Windows NT workstations. It announced a move from MIPS to Intel's Itanium processors. In 1999 it changed its public identity to SGI, though its legal name stayed Silicon Graphics, Inc. The key dates after that:

1. November 2005. The New York Stock Exchange delisted the stock.
2. May 8, 2006. SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
3. October 17, 2006. It emerged from bankruptcy. At the end of that year it moved its headquarters from Mountain View to Sunnyvale.
4. April 1, 2009. A second Chapter 11 filing, with a plan to sell nearly all its assets to Rackable Systems.
5. May 11, 2009. The sale closed for $42.5 million. Rackable took the name Silicon Graphics International. The remaining shell was renamed Graphics Properties Holdings in June 2009.
6. November 2016. Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought Silicon Graphics International.

The buildings it left behind

SGI's most visible legacy around here is real estate. Its earlier headquarters on North Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View is now home to the Computer History Museum, at 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard. Its later campus on Amphitheatre Parkway was leased by Google in 2003 and bought outright in 2006, becoming part of the Googleplex. Both were award-winning designs by Studios Architecture.

That handoff is a neat summary of Silicon Valley history. A hardware company born from a Stanford chip gave way to a search company born from Stanford software, in the same buildings. Our page on the Google Visitor Experience covers what visitors can see on the Google side of Shoreline today.

SGI's place in the local story

Silicon Graphics belongs to the generation of Stanford spinouts that made computers rather than websites, alongside Sun and Cisco. Its founders came straight from a university lab, it drew on government-funded research and it took its first big steps a few miles from campus. For the full sweep from instruments to software, see our Silicon Valley history.

It also trained a generation of graphics engineers. People who passed through SGI went on to work on graphics chips, game hardware and film software across the industry. That influence is harder to point to than a building, but it is real.

Finally, SGI is a reminder that Stanford spinouts do not always last. Within about 25 years the company went from a university chip to market leader to bankruptcy. Its name lived on for a while through Rackable and then disappeared into HPE. Few local companies show the full cycle so clearly, from a professor's lab to a museum building, in one lifetime.

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