I was in love with SGI when I was an undergraduate just over the hill at UC Santa Cruz in the early to mid 90s. Everything about the machines from their industrial designed cases but wonderfully colorful cases, and the sexy desktop OS ("This is UNIX. I know this!") and the way IrisGL rendered molecular graphics.
Driving to a Phish show at Shoreline, we passed the low-slung office buildings of SGI which seemed like the sexiest place to work. When I graduated, I thought I was "too dumb in CS" to get a job in Mountain View and went to grad school in biophysics instead.
By the time I was a few years into grad school, I worked in a computer graphics lab outfitted with Reality Monsters and Octanes and other high end SGIs (when you maxxed out an SGI's graphics and RAM, they were really fast). I was porting molecular graphics code to Linux using Mesa (much to the derision of the SGI fans in the lab). When we got a FireGL2 card it had a linux driver and could do reasonable molecular graphics in real time and the SGI folks looked real scared (especially because the SGI Visual Workstation had just come out and was a very expensive turkey).
Less than a decade after that I was working in those very buildings for Google. Google took over SGI's old HQ (Jeff Dean told me there was a period where Google and SGI overlapped in the GooglePlex and the SGI folks looked very sad as they paid for their lunches and teh googlers got free food). There was still plenty of SGI signage strewn about. And now Google has gone dumb and also built their own HQ next door (note the correlation between large SV companies building overly fancy HQs and then going out of business).
We've talked before about our respective molecular graphics background.
I started with Unix on a Personal IRIS as an undergrad working in a physics lab which used it for imaging capture and analysis. I was the nominal sys admin, with one semester of Minix under my belt and just enough to be dangerous. (I once removed /bin/cc because I thought it was possible to undelete, like on DOS. I had to ask around the meteorology department for a restore tape.)
The summer before grad school I got a job at the local supercomputing center to work on a parallelization of CHARMm, using PVM. I developed it on that PI, and on a NeXT. That's also when I learned about people at my future grad school working on VR for molecular visualization, in a 1992 CACM article. So when I started looking for an advisor, that's the lab I chose, and I became the junior co-author and eventual lead developer of VMD.
With a Crimson as my desktop machine, a lab full of SGIs and NeXTs, and the CAVE VR setup elsewhere in the building. Heady times.
I visited SGI in 1995 or so, on holiday, thinking that would be a great place to work. They even had an Inventor plugin for molecular visualization, so I thought it would be a good lead. I emailed and got an invited to visit, where the host kindly told me that they were not going to do more in molecular visualization because they wanted to provide the hardware everyone uses, and not compete in that software space.
In the early 1990s SGIs dominated molecular modeling (replacing Evans & Sutherland), so naturally the related tools, like molecular dynamics codes, also ran on them. But we started migrating to distributed computing, where it didn't make sense to have 16 expensive SGIs, leaving them more as the head .. which as you pointed out, was soon able to run just fine on a Linux machine.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is so unique or special about molecular visualisation compared to, say, Quake - or CAD? If you’ll permit me to reduce it down to “just” drawing organo-chem hexagons, lines, and red/grey/black spheres connecting those lines (and a 360-degrees spin animation for the investor-relations video) - where’s the room for the rest of CG? E.g., texture-mapping, fragment shaders, and displacement mapping?
Quakes came out in, what, 1996? And was written by some of the foremost practitioners of computer graphics?
We were a couple of physics grad students working on a side project in late 1993. My background was a semester course based on Foley & van Dam. Hardware gave us a 5-10 year lead over what we could have done with consumer tech.
There wasn't really a "rest of CG". Only the highest-end SGI machines at the time had hardware texture mapping - most did it in software (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Graphics).
We aren't talking 2D organo-chem hexagons, but 3D spheres and cylinders. Back around 1995 I posted some benchmarks to Usenet about the different approaches I tried (including NURBS), but I can no longer find a copy of it.
The straight-forward way is to render the spheres as a bunch of triangles, so, what, 50 polygons per sphere? Times 100,000 spheres = 5 million polygons. That was large for the time, but doable. Plus, during movement we used a lower level of detail.
What was Quake's polygon count?
Oh, and we're displaying animated molecules, including interacting with a live physics simulation, so no pre-computed BSP either.
Rastering spheres quickly on a PC was also possible then, which was RasMol's forte, but it was flat compared to having a couple hardware-based point lights plus ambient lighting.
Driving to a Phish show at Shoreline, we passed the low-slung office buildings of SGI which seemed like the sexiest place to work. When I graduated, I thought I was "too dumb in CS" to get a job in Mountain View and went to grad school in biophysics instead.
By the time I was a few years into grad school, I worked in a computer graphics lab outfitted with Reality Monsters and Octanes and other high end SGIs (when you maxxed out an SGI's graphics and RAM, they were really fast). I was porting molecular graphics code to Linux using Mesa (much to the derision of the SGI fans in the lab). When we got a FireGL2 card it had a linux driver and could do reasonable molecular graphics in real time and the SGI folks looked real scared (especially because the SGI Visual Workstation had just come out and was a very expensive turkey).
Less than a decade after that I was working in those very buildings for Google. Google took over SGI's old HQ (Jeff Dean told me there was a period where Google and SGI overlapped in the GooglePlex and the SGI folks looked very sad as they paid for their lunches and teh googlers got free food). There was still plenty of SGI signage strewn about. And now Google has gone dumb and also built their own HQ next door (note the correlation between large SV companies building overly fancy HQs and then going out of business).
Such is the cycle of sexy tech.