Silicon Graphics was started by Jim Clark and Abby Silverstone back in 1982. Jim Clark was at Stanford University, and along with Marc Hannah had thought up the revolutionary Geometry Engine - a VLSI implementation of geometry pipelines that provided dedicated hardware that boosted the “inner-loop” geometric calculations required to generate three-dimensional graphics.

Silicon Graphics lead the computer graphics industry, and in the 80s and 90s there was hardly a feature film that wasn’t powered by their awe-inspiring technology. Favourites such as Twister got their stunning special effects from the graphical and processing power of Silicon Graphics machines. If you remember the computer room in Jurassic Park - the large red computers were Silicon Graphics Crimsons, ground breaking desk-side graphics workstations that actually generated most of the effects in the film.

The range of Silicon Graphics servers used a CPU developed by MIPS, and ran Silicon Graphics’ own flavour of UNIX called IRIX. Silicon Graphics were the first company to release a 64bit CPU and a 64bit OS, with the Silicon Graphics Indy powered by a MIPS R4000 CPU and (later) with IRIX 6.2. Now their servers are based around Intel CPUs and run tuned releases of Linux.

Silicon Graphics’ servers have always been engineered for one thing - performance. Unlike a PC, the focus is never on pure CPU performance, but on the balanced performance of the system as a whole. This makes the servers usable for years, giving them a long working life compared to other vendor’s solutions.