When sgi a.k.a. Silicon Graphics went under it was a sad day indeed. Almost as sad as when Amiga went under. I know the Amiga + Toaster ate some of sgi's lunch but I always saw sgi as Amiga's big brother, wearing the grown-up pants and all. Plus, for the longest of time they featured in movies because they made their products look swanky.
IRIX was a very polished Unix OS. In the mid '90s I worked at a research facility for a mining company and part of my role was to look after the smallish modelling farm of an Origin server and four Indy II workstations. In 1999 I reluctantly turned down a job with sgi here in Camberwell, VIC (suburb of Melbourne) because I was at a start-up and I had stock options.
Another reason I miss sgi is because they were the purveyor of the MIPS architecture. And like at least one other member here stated, an impressive RISC architecture it was/is. MIPS is continually developed by the Chinese company Loongson. Which is why a few years back I posted on this forum or over at AW.net that Hyperion Entertainment should port Amiga OS to MIPS. All those Chinese academics using it would make for a decent business just by itself. Imagine, we could have been using Lemote notebooks by now. And the Loongson MIPS CPU is waaaaay cheaper than a comparable PPC CPU.
In another universe perhaps.
