'Dinosaur' Cray fights extinction with SGI link

WHEN Steven Spielberg decided he wanted to film Michael Crichton's book, Jurassic Park, he was prepared to do a little modernising on the King Kong puppet. He was all set to go when one of the lads at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) suggested using a computer.

The film was delayed while the ILM crowd put together a little demonstration. When he saw it, Mr Spielberg was, as they say, 'blown away'. What he saw was a demonstration of the power of 85 Silicon Graphics workstations helping to create a life-like creature from the past.

The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, although they were not from the Jurassic period, have entered into film legend and that was due in no small way to ILM and SGI. The T2000 killer in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was also created by SGI. Some people had already realised what SGI could do in the extraordinary T2000 killer in Terminator 2, now they could see dinosaurs come to life.

For a few years, then, SGI was viewed as the sexiest company in 'cyberdom'. Like many fairy tales, however, things began to go sour. SGI has been attacked from the top and the bottom.

At the lower end, the PowerPC-powered Macintosh has been slowly chipping away at some of the multimedia areas that were thought to be SGI territory. At the high end, both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems have been producing systems to rival the best of SGI.

At the same time that SGI has been having problems, Cray Research, the world's acknowledged master of the supercomputer, has also been experiencing trouble. Some people consider the era of the supercomputer over and that a company like Cray a dinosaur.

We have, therefore, the spectacle of one company famous for creating dinosaurs buying a company considered a dinosaur. Or have we? Before completely dismissing SGI and Cray, it is worth remembering that SGI has loyal friends - ILM and NASA to mention only two - and Cray has a considerable amount of research and expertise to offer.