Rackable Systems acquires SGI

Irix had many fine qualities. SGI packaging sensibilities were actually somewhat similar to Redhat in many ways. Most commerical Unixes shipped aweful configuration files. Linux was always better here, IMO. Irix was above average.

However, for all its features. Irix had the worst security of an Unix I can think of.

SUID executables that don't set PATH. 'EZsetup' accounts that were easy to leave enabled by accident. Other odd accounts with default passwords for 'demo software'.

SysV style 'chown give-away' worked. So if you could create a file somewhere you could set the permission and then give it to a user. This leads to all sort of bizarre vulnerabilities when utilities check to see if the file's ownership and permissions are safe before trusting its contents.

However, Irix could be secured. The OS was fairly decent. They just made it a challenge. Basically don't trust anything they wrote with SUID. Remove all their cronjobs and wonder what bizzare 'feature' you broke. :)

They did have some nice features... GL, FAM, XFS. They would periodically show off and set new IO records with their architecture, but they also some fancy techniques to set records that were a bit dodgy that have not been ported elsewhere. (I vaguely recall it was possible to do device-to-device DMA transfers for example)

Really, SGIs were just nice machines not everything they did was polished, but the systems were pleasant and shiny. They have never been smart on the business side however. They failed over and over again. The visual workstations were a failure. They were hurt by the Itanium failure. I was pleased with their Linux work, but I lost a lot of respect for them when they stripped Cray of the T3E and killed that product rather than allow a much cheaper HPC solution to exist. They were not the most common machines to compile software on. Sometimes I would see messages from build scripts like 'Holy crap that worked send me an email at ...' when I would finish building things.

* chown give-away mean root privilege is not require to assign ownership to someone else for example:

$ touch my_gift_to_you
$ chmod 600 my_gift_to_you
$ chown you my_gift_to_you