
Crucial
Crucial was the brand under which Micron Technology sold its consumer memory and storage products, until the brand was discontinued in 2026.
Worth it for the parts we point at, not all the way through.
1 brief · 10 min


Silicon Graphics built the first practical hardware-accelerated 3D graphics systems. Its Geometry Engine — designed at Stanford under ARPA — delivered ~6 million geometry operations per second. It pioneered scalable cc-NUMA architectures in the mid-1990s. But its reliance on proprietary MIPS and failed transitions to Itanium and Xeon eroded its position as PC graphics commoditised. It filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
