The interesting thing is that a single executive had a large share in killing both HP and SGI as major players. Richard Belluzzo was the guy who decided that HP should switch from HP UX on PA-RISC to Windows NT on Itanium, and then moved to SGI to preside over the decision to turn SGI into a Windows reseller and gave the SGI 3D graphics team — which at the time had a legendary reputation — to nVidia along with their patent portfolio.

Yep, I've studied this in great detail as I was very personally affected by it: it's always the same people who were the root cause of this. Sun Microsystems was the only company which stuck to its guns and continued with UNIX, sometimes in direct competition with the Microsoft corporation, because the engineers fought for their life's work like crazy, ultimately resulting in illumos today, so it lives on.

Scott McNealy, bless his heart, was the only executive openly willing to testify in the case against Microsoft versus NetScape: none of these other "executives" had the balls to testify for fear of making Bill Gates angry.

It was always the same set of people hopping companies, selling their bullshit and ruining them. Now we have an inferior operating system on inferior hardware, total chaos in virtualisation and cloud, low salaries and bad working conditions, in good part thanks to them ruining these UNIX companies.

WOW. I did not know this. And now NVidia is far more than a "gaming" company.

Yeah, there's a really interesting alternative history of computing where SGI's management was anywhere near the same caliber as their engineering.

SGI engineers designed and implemented mind-blowing stuff: inst(1M) software management subsystem is still lightyears ahead of any other, even today, and how long has IRIX been out of production?

Unbelievably mind blowing engineers.

Yep. "Infinite Reality" was a precursor to the Nvidia technology today. That's when first shader pipelines came into existence.

>ditched their super-cool, PA-RISC

HP had an interesting portfolio from their Digital and Tandem acquisitions also including the Alpha processor and of course Tandem's non-stop OS. I imagine the pairing of those two by porting non-stop to the Alpha or bringing non-stop's features into Ultrix might have at least kept them a niche player.

Having said that HP, Digital and Tandem weren't alone in losing marketshare to Linux on commodity hardware, or for that matter Linux on HP hardware itself. Imagine if HP had read the tea leaves and created Red Hat themselves instead of losing enterprise linux to someone else. HP is awash in lost opportunities.

I'm imagining hp workstations with razor-thin margins running HP-UX beating the cheapest PC at brick and mortar stores feature-for-feature, value for the dollar, with tons of multimedia and productivity software preinstalled, since hp hardware had phenomenal multimedia capabilities.

That should have happened with all UNIX vendors but it didn't because the managers believed that they could charge premiums. They managed to brainwash even their engineers so they couldn't see the danger. I used to argue not only with Sun salesmen about this, but even the engineers would defend the price premiums.

We all know how that ended. I have the curse of being right about the wrong thing.

I'd love to see an x86 HP-UX build running on a Z workstation. absolutely not going to happen but still.