Spotted today that sgi have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It’s sad that the once great maker of high-end graphics workstations has been reduced to this, but I can’t help but feel the writing was on the wall once they diverted from their core competency with products like the Windows NT-based Visual Workstation series. The purchase and later sale of Cray also suggested that they didn’t know where their focus was.

This doesn’t have to be the end – perhaps it’s the end of the beginning and sgi will re-emerge a better and more focused company. Either way, I think it’s the end of IRIX – if sgi do survive, I think they’ll focus primarily in Linux-based systems, and abandon MIPS and IRIX to the history books.