why Silicon Graphics never made a "prosumer" computer
They were stuck in a hopeless corporate mindset where their customers were all deep pocket mega corps. You had to go through a sales process to buy one, there was no demo machine at the local computer shop. They also had a brain damaged sales team that would do things like e.g. under-spec hardware with too little RAM to make a sale leaving customers with costly hardware that struggled under loads damaging their reputation (e.g. imagine a class room full of underspecd machines leaving students thinking "this pos made Jurassic Park?").
if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it.
They would look exactly like the Indy or the later O2 which were their entry level machines.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Nintendo had released kits for the N64 that let you use it more as a computer.
I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any substantial text work impractical (e.g. word processing or code editing). However, a better N64 fantasy IMO would be to include an optical drive in addition to the cart slot, double the RAM, increase the pitiful 4kb texture cache, then for good measure - N64 themed kb, mouse and Ethernet adapter ;-).
I'm just thinking that it's all about timing; if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers",
That line would be the SGI Visual Workstations. The first two, the 320 and 540 had custom motherboards with SGI chipset, RAM and GPU. The GPU used unified memory and you needed to buy expensive custom SGI RAM DIMMS. They only ever ran Win NT 4.0 and 2k because of the GPU drivers. Then there was the 230, 330, and 550 - strait up ATX Wintel boxes with Nvidia cards. My main desktop is a 550 case with a Threadripper in it. But again, IMO, they had no clue how to sell to small shops and individuals and by then, too little, too late.
I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any substantial text work impractical
Yeah, in this hypothetical conversion kit they've have to give you some kind of better connections to plug into a monitor, and obviously some kind of conversion kit, maybe a double-expansion-pak, and maybe some kind of external optical drive or something similar to the N64 DD with a CD drive.
I dunno, I don't think it would necessarily have failed, but we'll obviously never really know. Sony did that with the OtherOS stuff for awhile on the PS3, and I think there was a subset of people who really liked it for scientific computing.
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They were stuck in a hopeless corporate mindset where their customers were all deep pocket mega corps. You had to go through a sales process to buy one, there was no demo machine at the local computer shop. They also had a brain damaged sales team that would do things like e.g. under-spec hardware with too little RAM to make a sale leaving customers with costly hardware that struggled under loads damaging their reputation (e.g. imagine a class room full of underspecd machines leaving students thinking "this pos made Jurassic Park?").
They would look exactly like the Indy or the later O2 which were their entry level machines.
I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any substantial text work impractical (e.g. word processing or code editing). However, a better N64 fantasy IMO would be to include an optical drive in addition to the cart slot, double the RAM, increase the pitiful 4kb texture cache, then for good measure - N64 themed kb, mouse and Ethernet adapter ;-).
That line would be the SGI Visual Workstations. The first two, the 320 and 540 had custom motherboards with SGI chipset, RAM and GPU. The GPU used unified memory and you needed to buy expensive custom SGI RAM DIMMS. They only ever ran Win NT 4.0 and 2k because of the GPU drivers. Then there was the 230, 330, and 550 - strait up ATX Wintel boxes with Nvidia cards. My main desktop is a 550 case with a Threadripper in it. But again, IMO, they had no clue how to sell to small shops and individuals and by then, too little, too late.
Yeah, in this hypothetical conversion kit they've have to give you some kind of better connections to plug into a monitor, and obviously some kind of conversion kit, maybe a double-expansion-pak, and maybe some kind of external optical drive or something similar to the N64 DD with a CD drive.
I dunno, I don't think it would necessarily have failed, but we'll obviously never really know. Sony did that with the OtherOS stuff for awhile on the PS3, and I think there was a subset of people who really liked it for scientific computing.