SGI tried its hand at the PC video card business as early as 1990. I was at Autodesk at the time and got one of these to beta test on a DOS 486 running AutoCAD. It was an impressive product. But huge; it took up two full-length ISA slots. And the display drivers were a bit buggy.
I doubt that would have helped. Customers didn't love Irix as an OS. They tolerated it in order to use SGI's superior hardware and specialized applications.
Competitors such as Sun did port their proprietary Unix flavors to the x86 PC platform but never achieved traction. It was impossible to compete with free Linux, and lack of device drivers was always an obstacle.
Kind of. Oxide uses what's left of OpenSolaris as their OS of choice and Oracle still sells Solaris SPARC servers. It's the retreat up - they can defend their hill for a long time that way and, in Oracle's case, they don't even innovate the same way IBM does with POWER and Z.
