SGI Sold to Rackable Systems for $25M, Conditionally

TG Daily ^ | Wednesday, April 01, 2009 | Rick C. Hodgin

[nickcarraway]

Ping

[pikachu]

I miss the Indy and the Challenge S that I used to manage. Good hardware but badly run business.

[Frantzie]

SGI was hot stuff during their day. Sad.

[ShadowAce]

I used to work for Linux Networx, which went under and SGI bought most of the remaining assets. Now they're part of Rackable.

[nickcarraway]

SGI bought Cray a while back, but they may have already sold it.

[JRios1968]

Sometimes the jokes write themselves...

[bmwcyle]

ping

[ArrogantBustard]

SGI was always really great hardware, at way too high a price. If you really needed the performance, NOW, you could almost justify the cost ... if not ... HP and Sun would be right there in a few months (on performance), at a lower cost.

[bmwcyle]

It was good equipment and IRIX was a good O/S. They just spent too much of their profits on crap.

[Revolting cat!]

(That's what we called these boxes when the IT Dept bought them for programmers to draw their designs.)

[nickcarraway]

They spent too much money on an elaborate headquarters, now the home of Google.

[ArrogantBustard]

They never quite caught on to the trick of selling cheaply to many ...

[1rudeboy]

I learned one of my first rules of investing here: never let a company change its name (from Silicon Graphics to SGI) for no reason pass without completely bailing-out of its stock. :)

It's all good--I only lost 600 dollars.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Didn’t know that...

[shorty_harris]

The old Silicon Graphics building is now the Computer History Museum.

[bigbob]

No kidding...when I worked on a project there in the late 90s, right at the end of the year they had $20 million worth of crates in a parking lot under armed guard, orders had been pushed out before the end of the year ready to ship. Hiring bonuses for assembly workers then was $3K - they literally could not build the stuff fast enough.

[ThePythonicCow]

SGI bought Cray a while back, but they may have already sold it.

SGI bought Cray in 1996, and sold it to Tera in 2000. Much of the current core of SGI development engineering and manufacturing in Wisconsin and Minnesota came from Cray.

[ThePythonicCow]

They spent too much money on an elaborate headquarters, now the home of Google.

That building wasn't a total loss -- the income from leasing it to Google was a major source of revenue for SGI during some of its recent lean years.

[ThePythonicCow]

The old Silicon Graphics building is now the Computer History Museum.

I wouldn't say "The old SGI building". I'd say one of them, a building that SGI acquired that was closer to the main freeway (on the same street as a major Silicon Valley Microsoft campus) with intentions of using it for marketing.

The main SGI buildings were a mile up the road, away from the freeway, closer to (or most recently right on top of) the Mountain View sanitary land fill.