Those digital dinos symbolize SGI's preeminence as the platform for creating state-of-the-art 3-D special effects. The company's revolutionary workstations, as you might have heard (unless you've been vacationing on Mars), were used to create the mind-boggling dinos that scared the pants off millions and millions of moviegoers who saw Jurassic Park. These days, when most people think of Silicon Graphics, they think dinosaurs.

'Apple,' Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. Jim Clark is arrogant, driven, cunning, and - as one industry analyst puts it - 'very persuasive.' He possesses a keen intellect, and is one of a new breed of '90s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who refuse to let themselves be seduced by their own success.Ĭlark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM. I have to think I've done SGI a big service - pulling it by the hair into these new markets.' With any given company, there are always several possible futures. He leans forward in his chair and says with intense conviction, ' 'Cause I thought it was vital to what I perceived to be the right future for the company. 'I had an interest that I felt was important for the company, and if the company did not share that feeling I was going to go someplace else.' 'If not for Mark I think I probably wouldn't be here today,' Clark says. (Hannah helped develop the original architectures - the Geometry Engine ASICs - that handle most of the graphics processing in SGI's machine.) His only ally was SGI chief scientist Mark Hannah, one of a small group of Stanford University students who started SGI with Clark in 1981. The workstation business became a gold mine for SGI, whose earnings ballooned from $167 million in 1988 to just over a billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1993.īy the end of the '80s Clark was looking beyond high-end workstations, gazing into the future, setting his sights on entering the still nascent world of 'convergence' that will fuse computers and television. 'I've come to conclude that at companies, as they get large, management simply cannot and will not look at new opportunities,' he says. Ironically, SGI became so successful making high-end graphics workstations that many executives at the company lost sight of Clark's broader vision. 'He's probably the only one who really believed ten years ago that that technology would end up in the home.' 'I think that Jim, to use that horribly overused word, is a visionary,' says Robert Herwick, a technology analyst at Hambrecht & Quist.

It was the same kind of resistance he came up against in 1981, when he tried to interest IBM, DEC, and others in the original interactive 3-D graphics technology that had motivated him to form SGI. It wasn't the first time Clark's ideas had met with skepticism. If you want to do that, you maybe ought to do that on your own.' ' 'Three years ago, it was even said, 'You're nuts. 'Most people here couldn't see it,' he says. At the moment, though, he's neither laughing nor grinning.

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