One of the commercial AT&T-Unix; heirs has announced the end sales of it’s operating system. In a press release today SGI announced the end of general availability of its IRIX operating system with December 29, 2006. The company will continue support this product until December 2013 though. The full press release can be found here. IRIX has won fame as the Unix for graphical applications such as rendering or finite element modeling and simulations. The end of sales of IRIX now again hardens the prejudice that Unixes are generally graphic averse operating systems. And note the extreme long support IRIX gets from SGI. But for ‘hard iron’ manufacturers such long support periods are totally normal. This is a commercial product after all and the customers pay (heavily) for getting care as long as they run their machines. As far as FreeBSD is concerned, the level of maturity it has compared to Linux is nothing compared to such products as IRIX. So I wonder why SGI decided to switch to Linux and didn’t follow Apple by starting over with a (i386-)BSD OS.