SGI was hot stuff during their day. Sad.
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.
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.