Vanishing Visual Effects

It used to be, back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, that you couldn’t talk about Hollywood visual effects without mentioning Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), the company responsible for the hardware and software behind blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and Abyss among many others. With such high profile projects it seemed unlikely that SGI would eventually become obsolete, but by the mid-2000s, that’s exactly what SGI had become as other players pushed into its market with faster and cheaper technology, leading SGI to declare bankruptcy. Its most recent technological foray was in “large-scale clustered computing [and] storage,” or, to boil it down, servers. In May, another server company, Rackable, purchased SGI and despite the battered reputation i