...SGI, one of the most innovative and important hardware and software companies, filed chapter 11.

SGI probably won't go away any time soon. The US govt. has too many of them to allow them to completely disappear (the NSA uses rooms full of Crays (once owned by SGI) and SGIs on their fishing trips). But it is likely that they will become merely a shell company that exists merely to service existing contracts.

Unfortunately, since their pathetic "partnership" with Microsoft, and a series of golden parachutists, SGI has been almost completely unable to re-invest in their own technology, neither hardware nor software. Innovation and unbelievable speed, were the two reasons to buy SGI. Without capital to reinvest, SGI is a sitting duck.

From my experience with working with and for SGI - they lost their direction when they lost their founder. He went on to found Netscape, and has since retired from Netscape to found a company that builds highly automated luxury yachts.

Last year I retired the last of SGI boxes. It was a sad parting. When I bought my first SGI it was the fastest computer one could buy for less than $50,000. It was many times faster than the fastest wintel PCs of that era. And for 3D it was hundreds of times faster. I ran that box for almost a decade before there was anything desktop close in speed. The year I bought that box, SGI set performance records in nearly every arena of computing.

Very few people know this, but during the beta stage for Sesame, we devloped not only on Wintel and Linux, but also on SGI. But even by then, the market was too small to bother continuing the SGI version.

I just hope that someday we will see more companies that have the daring, innovative spirit, inventiveness, and just plain know how, that was central to the original "workstation" companies - like SGI, Sun, (earlier) HP, Xerox, DEC, and Apollo.

It sure would be nice to have some alternatives to Intel.

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Fortunately, no. My investment was mostly in hardware. I have about 8 SGI boxes kicking around here. SGI's stock was delisted about a year ago (or was it two), and has been in the sub -dollar range for a fews years.
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SGI claims that the venders will be paid as per individual agreement and the bankrupcy won't affect them. But who (other than the judge) can really say?

I feel sorry for the employees. A lot of friends and acquaintances have been let go after years at SGI. Though, many have landed on their feet at NVidea or Pixar. Pretty much all of SGI R&D was dismantled as of a couple of months ago.

That may actually have been SGI's downfall. They never seemed to be able to balance between R&D and marketing. They always had all of the one and none of the other, or vice-versa.