Who owns sgi

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Image Credit: SGI. He went on to earn an M. Clark then committed himself to an academic career, holding teaching posts at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the New York Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley before coming to Stanford.

Along the way, however, he became disenchanted with academia. Universities encourage writing a lot of papers. Once he established the company, Clark displayed the good sense to find his proper role within the operating structure and stick to it.

Clark concentrated on serving as the company's technology guru, leaving McCracken to take care of the business operations. According to McCracken, this role best suited Clark's temperament: "Jim's not a day-to-day person. He works in his own time frame," he told the Business Journal--San Jose. McCracken continued, "He takes complex things and makes it simple.

It might take a month, a day, or a year. He gets in these moods for a while where he's almost unavailable. He's most effective when he's in that mood. A useful blend of high technology and business sense enabled Silicon Graphics to move forward from its early successes. Within several years, most workstations would use RISCs.

Also in , Silicon Graphics introduced amid much fanfare a new line of entry level graphics workstations, which it called Eclipse. Although it dominated the more expensive end of the graphics workstation market, the company needed to broaden its customer base if it expected to maintain sales growth.

The Eclipse was designed to bring 3-D graphics to people who had previously regarded IRIS workstations as unaffordable. Eclipse scored a major success soon after its release when Chrysler announced that it would buy a large number of the machines to go with the IRIS workstations that it was already using to help design its automobiles. Although Eclipse put Silicon Graphics into more direct competition with its rival workstation manufacturers, who began to chip in with their own low-end 3-D workstations, it also succeeded in expanding the company's customer base.

The move into the lower priced, high-volume end of the market worked well enough for Silicon Graphics that in the company released an even less expensive product line--the IRIS Indigo, a 3-D graphics workstation so compact that the company called it the first personal computer to use RISC architecture.

During this time, Silicon Graphics scored several major coups on the business side. Together, these moves provided software developers with greater incentive to write programs for Silicon Graphics machines and also broadened the company's customer base even further.

The merger with MIPS was "endorsed" by a consortium of eight international high-tech companies, which announced plans to buy 1. It turned out to be a successful merger. By mid the company was able to ship the new R microprocessor, and MIPS employees who survived layoffs seemed productively integrated into the Silicon Graphics organization.

In January Silicon Graphics announced a new computer that would use RISC architecture to achieve supercomputer power at relatively affordable prices. The Power Challenge, as it was called, would link multiple RISCs in a single machine to provide unprecedented processing capability in a computer of that price. The new product was announced over a year in advance of its anticipated shipping date to give targeted customers, such as government agencies and universities previously unable to afford supercomputers, time to include it in their budgets.

Observers pegged Power Challenge as a sudden move into the faltering field of supercomputer manufacturing, but in fact the company's ever more powerful workstations were approaching the level of supercomputers anyway, and the company had already established contacts with customers at whom the Power Challenge would be aimed. In April Silicon Graphics and Industrial Light and Magic, the famed special effects division of Lucasfilm, announced that they had joined forces to create a high-tech entertainment special effects laboratory.

The liquid metal cyborg featured in the film Terminator 2, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, special effects in The Hunt for Red October and The Abyss, and animation in Beauty and the Beast were all created on Silicon Graphics computers. For Lucas and Industrial Light and Magic, JEDI was expected to yield both financial and aesthetic benefits: digital manipulation of images cost about one-tenth as much as models and drawings, and, according to Lucas, would "change motion pictures from a photographic process to more of a painterly process," enabling greater authorial control over a film's appearance.

For its part, Silicon Graphics hoped that alliance with an entertainment industry partner would help push the leading edge of its technological development forward. The entertainment industry was a growing interest of James Clark's at the time.

Alias specialized in 3-D animation software that was widely used in the entertainment industry and in industrial design. It had developed new ways to simulate wind, fire, skin, and other special effects, and it also had an animation tool used by Nintendo in its video games. WaveFront Technologies developed industrial visualization software.

Silicon Graphics was facing fierce competition in the 3-D graphics and imaging markets from Apple Computer Inc. Although lower end workstations accounted for more than half of Silicon Graphics' revenues, its high-end workstations were facing increasing competition from lower-priced PCs. Silicon Graphics created a new software business unit, Cosmo Software, to manage and develop areas such as VRML, 3-D, audio, and video software for multiple platforms. Silicon Graphics' losses were caused by several factors.

More than half of Silicon Graphics' sales came from shrinking markets such as Unix workstations and supercomputers, whose sales were being undercut by less expensive machines running industry standard Windows NT on Intel processors.

Silicon Graphics also had a poor operations record, with numerous product delays, production shortfalls, and a lack of controls.