![]() Silicon Graphics succeeded because it introduced a product that served cross-markets, from 3-D graphics simulations useful to mechanical engineers who wanted to assess their designs without having to build prototypes, to chemists who used 3-D modeling to study molecules. These early entries in the IRIS series targeted the middle range of the graphics workstations market – those selling for $45,000 to $100,000 – and accounted for over 50 percent of all 3-D graphics workstations sold by 1988. The next year Silicon Graphics released its first workstation, the IRIS 1400, and followed it in 1985 with the IRIS 2400, a workstation with a window manager. It used the 8MHz M68000 processor with up to 2 MB memory, a custom 1024×1024 frame buffer, and the Geometry Engine gave the workstation its impressive image generation power. In 1983 the company released its first products: the IRIS (Integrated Raster Imaging System) 1000 graphics terminal and an accompanying software interface known as the IRIS Graphics Library. Silicon Graphics capitalized on pioneering technology in 3-D computer graphics to create products used in a wide variety of professions, including engineering, chemistry, and film production. Its history may be described as an exemplary Silicon Valley success story, until lower-priced competitors and inept production methods resulted in heavy losses in the late 1990s. (later known simply as SGI) was one of the leading manufacturers of graphics computer systems, workstations, and supercomputers. Clark attempted to shop his design around to computer companies, and finding no takers, he and colleagues at Stanford started their own company, Silicon Graphics Inc. His idea, called the Geometry Engine, was to create a collection of components in a VLSI processor that would accomplish the main operations that were required in the image synthesis pipeline: matrix transforms, clipping, and the scaling operations that provided the transformation to view space. One of the most important contributions in the area of display hardware is attributed to Jim Clark of Stanford in 1982. Apollo was acquired by HP in 1989, and they merged their own Series 9000 workstation line with that of the Apollo systems. It was the first real two-instruction microprocessor and the fastest available workstation until the IBM RS/6000 series. Their workstations were widely used through the mid 80s, and Apollo, Sun, and HP each had about 20% of the workstation market when Apollo (after a short try at a joint project with Intel), produced the DN3000, the DN4000 and four-CPU DN10000 workstations (DN meant “DOMAIN Node”.) They introduced the PRISM CPU to the market. Apollo, one of the real workstation pioneers, started their workstation development in 1981 with the DN100 and later the DN550. ![]() Early on the Sun 1, the Sun 2 and Sun 3 workstations came on the market. Several early graphics workstations were sold by Apollo and Sun. ![]() Customers used graphics workstations for electronic and mechanical design because basic workstations were too slow and lacked sophisticated graphics. In the early 1980s some computer companies concentrated their efforts on the development of specialized workstations, the “ graphics workstation”.
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