SGI
(SGI, Sunnyvale, CA, www.sgi.com) A manufacturer of workstations and servers, founded in 1982 by Jim Clark. The company was founded as Silicon Graphics, Inc., but changed to its acronym in 1999. Optimized with its proprietary graphics technologies, SGI offers a line of Unix and Linux workstations and servers that are geared to high-performance computing and visualization.
SGI shipped its first graphics terminal in 1983 and first workstation in 1984 and has always led the way in computer graphics. Its custom chips and subsystems perform the tedious processing necessary to display objects on screen. Running a flight simulator on an SGI workstation was always far more realistic than any video game. In 1992, SGI acquired MIPS Technologies and, before spinning it off again in 2000, used its RISC-based microprocessors in most of its product lines. SGI computers are used in a variety of commercial, industrial and military applications.
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| Dr. James H. Clark |
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| Clark has a penchant for creating innovative companies. He founded SGI in 1982 and Netscape in 1994. (Image courtesy of SGI.) |
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| Virtual Reality |
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| Moving through a 3D environment that looks as real as this has always been SGI's specialty. (Image courtesy of SGI.) |