The o2 used a unified memory scheme so it's graphics were never as fast as it's big brother the octane's impact graphics but because of the unified memory it was a texture power house in comparison, close to a GB of texture memory in 1996 is mind blowing, in comparison the ocatane's impact graphics had 4 mb of texture memory and if you payed out the big bucks for a max impact with double the memory(which was the size of a large motherboard)... you still only got 4mb because the extra memory was basicly sli. and a graphics board that had the reputation of desoldering it's own memory off.
A 3dfx card running in an O2 surely deserves a similar moniker :)
EDIT: all of them use MiniGL, damn....
3DFX had a mantra of “no CAD” so didn’t support OpenGl, as they saw it as a primarily aimed at running CAD software etc. So therefore they had to come up with the somewhat hacky MiniGL to implement enough of OpenGL to get Quake to actually run.
In 2000, I was the 20th-or-so full-time engineer at VMware, where I worked for 9 years. Then was at Facebook from 2009 to 2016, where I worked on the search backend (now replaced), HHVM (which still runs the Big Blue Application, a shrinking portion of the Meta Empire), and started FAIR in 2015 (which finally seems to have turned around the "open" sign with Yann's departure).
In 2016 I started at Slack as Chief Architect, where I mostly did not write a ton of code. I worked on a job queue scheduler which I would not be surprised to find has been replaced. And after that I was mostly encouraging/advising people doing Real Work.
All of which is to say, it is quite possible that the last code I've worked on professionally that is out there running on customer machines ... is that libpthread mutex bug fix from when I was barely old enough to drink.
Also, tech support was outstanding.
What a great way to start your career.
If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like?
Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.
SGI creates a low power cpu for Apple to use in portable devices, eventually in desktops and laptops (no Arm).
And either: SGI launches low budget PC with playstation 1 level 3d graphics as soon as they could compete with win3.1/95, running Irix. Or: A few years after that SGI launches what is essentially the Voodoo 2.
Any way you look at it the only possible future for SGI was low cost mass market devices. Just a matter of picking which one, they picked none.
The crazy thing is, SGI did have internal research projects to do such things .. they had engineers working on porting Netscape to the N64, which could very well have served as the basis for a more interesting consumer-end mass market device. Imagine if someone at SGI had put a cell modem in the mix somehow, yikes.
Well, its all a dream. Meanwhile I still have all my SGI gear, and I'm not afraid to admit I've been looking at 3DFX Voodoo cards on EBay a little more than I should have today ..
The PSP, and twice, as it had an r3k interpreter/loader for PSX games.
Also, you can call me crazy, but I played Nethack under the PSP with the CFW mod setting the clock from 222MHZ to 50MHZ lasting the battery a few hours more...
The GCWZero was a MIPS console too, and pcsx-rearmed had optimisations for that too.
There have been a couple of GCWZero clones made in more recent years (e.g. from Anbernic) running the same (or a derivative) Linux-based OS with JZ4770 MIPS SoC and software compatibility. Too bad Ingenic never released any successor to the SoC though.
Do you have any more info? Is that something you ever had a copy of?
You can't change a company that sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K, and the PC was just making the old business model impossible. Apart from anything else, there were some good tools on the PC, albeit MS Office and Adobe Photoshop. The situation was doomed when you didn't need SGI to do decent 3D. They never would have reinvented themselves for this age, sad to say.
Well .. Apple ended up doing it. Why couldn't SGI? /s
Oh, I know why SGI couldn't do it: elitism. They were high on their own hubris for the latter part of the 90's when they should have been humbled by 3DS Max and Animation:Master eating their lunch .. and used that humility to build products that made people Think Different™ .. they already had a market doing just that, thinking differently to everyone else (who were bleating "Unix is dying, its gonna die, let it die!" at a fever pitch), but that market thought quite a bit too highly of themselves, methinks .. (I know, I was there, and I was one of them.. apart from the "Unix is dying" bit, I never once thought that since the day I had a MIPS RISC/os-based Magnum pizzabox plopped on my desk and was told to do something productive with it..)
GNU/Linux with KDE3 could have been close but sadly it was too fragmented. If not, well... imagine a full libre QT from the beginning, GTK no existing (no reason for GTK+/Gnome as KDE would have been good enough), automagic Motif converting code into QT at blazing speeds, and QT themselves releasing high quality C bindings. It could have been unstoppable, even more than Apple. No ESD vs ArtsD, Pipewire merging Pulse/ESD and the like would happened long ago. Kparts would left DBUS and COM/OLE in the dust. KHTML/Webkit would have been even far more powerful.
Fedora woudn´t be the reference distro, maybe Slackware with dependencies handled with Slapt-get and a nice GUI installer for newbies. A whole different world, where the smartphones would provice both an input interface... and a sliding keyboard.