A $36,000 Graphical Workstation from 1993 | SGI Indigo 2
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- Опубликовано: 26 сен 2024
- In this video I looked at the SGI Indigo 2, A $36,000 workstation from 1993!
This machine has been a lot of fun to play with, I want a whole network of SGI machines! This thing is visually striking in every way, I love it!
SYSTEM SPECS
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Mainboard: IP22
CPU: Mips R4400
FPU: Mips R4010
RAM: 128MB 72-pin SIMM
GPU: Express (GR3-Elan)
OS: IRIX 5.3
Option drive: 60-90m DDS Tape Drive
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I’m glad this showed up in my recommendations! I worked at SGI from 1996 to 1997, it’s still the best and most fun job I ever had.
nerd alert
More like absolute gigachad alert
im surprised you kept your youtube account for THAT LONG
@@hatsuneadc nah giganerd alert
@@rokiesatowe are ancient
In the early 00's I collected ALL of the SGI machines I could get ahold of when they were cheap and easy to find. I had many Indigo 2's, O2's, Octanes and I have 2 Origin 2000 racks in my basement right now :)
You should make a video, would be so cool to see som old nerd stuff 😉
@@cutemartinj yess, really cool idea
@@cutemartinj hey, I actually do have a video of it on my channel.. it's a crappy video. I ended up getting a fresh copy of Irix on it but didn't film any of that. Someone my buddy knows was remotely using it to compile some software for a while.
When I have time I'll pull it out again. It's been years.
@@mapesdhs597 holy crap! Cool!
@@fc3sbob Awesome 🤗
I'm an Indy owner. I can tell you SGI is the best ever.
I just use Indiegogo. hehe But yeah, it was a cool machine at the time, the Amiga was the closest that came to it in terms of graphics capabilites.
Serious question, why and why today ?
@@yorkan213swd6 As someone who doesn't currently have any SGI gear, but kinda "grew up" on it (my mom worked there when I was in high school, and then I did off and on for several years), I'll just say: while I'm sure an SGI machine would be comparatively slow these days compared to modern hardware, the software was just... so nice. IRIX in general, 4Dwm, Indigo Magic Desktop, inst, ...... various things. I'd kinda like one... and if I was super rich, I'd hire people to write versions of a lot of that software to run on modern Linux machines. It was just _so_ much nicer than a lot of modern stuff. Like, imagine being used to driving some high-end sports car from 30 years ago, and then getting into some modern low-end car. Like, yeah, there's stuff that's fancier in the modern low-end car, and heck, it might even be more powerful or whatever, but it just doesn't have that... something... that je ne sais quoi. So, can't speak for Niko, but can say I miss being on SGI gear.
@@yorkan213swd6 I can't speak for OP, but they're pretty collectible retro machines owing to their rarity (that is relative to the usual home computers that most retrocomputing enthusiasts collect like Amigas and Atari STs.)
I worked for an asset management company in the late 90’s and we were literally junking these things, breaks my heart now!
Damn that's crazy 😲😲
Well, actually, they're junk.
@@jarinaumanen8447 say hello to the shadow realm
@@jarinaumanen8447 imagine being this loud while being this wrong
@@HalianTheProtogen I've chucked 5 year old ThinkStations - kinda the same thing
I had a fleet of these machines. They were *INSANE* machines for the time. We had about 140 of them (we were government) with dual attach FDDI sitting on the GIO. Had 4-5 machines on a ring with a DECSwitch connecting everything up.
So who were you oppressing or spying on exactly officer?
@@Klonkus We were doing Auroral and spacial physics!
@@tcpnetworks Yeah physics okay. Antigravity maybe.
@@Klonkus We were spying though.... On particles... :)
@@tcpnetworks I crave forbidden knowledge
All the early CGI hardware was legendary. The resulting media products can still make you laugh today xD
Haha, you mean like the Octane release soundtrack? ;)
I have an SGI Indigo 2 and an Onyx workstation in my attic right now. I never had the heart to throw them out since they cost so much money back when I bought them. I had a commercial compnay in SIlicon Valley back in the 90's. Those were amazing times back then. Thanks for the video.
You know, people always talk about "It's a UNIX system! I know this!", but for me, the best line from that scene is "Ellie, boot up the door locks!" 😆
It's crazy that noways most phones in our pockets have more computational and graphical power than there early specialized machines.
@@BillAnt Not just a bit, but like thousands of times. It still baffles me we can do video decoding at less than one Watt for full HD.
What NOO It's Her running in the Kitchen
The demo was called "Buttonfly".
I was a demo artist for TDI Explore, which later got bought by Wavefront and became their next generation software. Wavefront then merged with Alias and the TDI Explore code became the basis for Maya.
I would demo on a first generation Indigo. My favorite part of it was the optional knob box with eight encoder knobs. So you could move an item on X and Y axis with the mouse, and adjust on the Z axis with the knob. It was awesome, real two-fisted computing.
When I worked a student worker sysadmin at the Engineering Research Center at my college I had to transport 5 of these in my car across campus. The value of computers in my truck was like 10x what my car was worth. I feel very lucky to have come up with access to machines like this from the Onyx servers to these amazing desktop machines. Fun times! Thanks for sharing.
In the late 1990s I was a student intern at Alias|Wavefront, the people who made Maya and most of the other underlying tools from the 1990s that made 3D graphics so accessible. I really wish I had a few of those machines now.
From what I can gather the red indigo2 with the weird badge at 2:04 is actually one of the early prototype designs for the Impact R10k systems. I believe that none exist nowadays sadly.
Ahh, yeah... that sounds highly plausible. Interesting.
I love watching vids like this because it's amazing to see just how far computers have come. These systems here truly were unparalleled powerhouses in their day, both from a hardware and software standpoint, yet nowadays even the most low end modern gaming PC can run circles around them.
Only a couple of months ago I was in a nostalgic mood and reminisced using these SGI Indigo workstations for refining x-ray and neutron diffraction data to determine and visualise crystal structures of novel materials. Fun times.
Nice!
I remember during my computer science undergraduate, the school was using these Indigos. My GIS class was full of them and the room was secured. Anyways, I admired SGI for having good industrial designers making beautiful looking computers.
One little curiosity I've always wanted to see with these machines is how the 3D modeling software works. Especially compared to modern day Blender.
I've never seen anyone try to showcase a sort of "doughnut tutorial" for these old SGI machines, so it would be cool to see how people in the 90s modeled in 3D.
Well with old blender that was possible too. Before blender was very ready. Early builds of it ran on the indigo 2.
Look up the channel Irinikus. I think he has a number of examples of using Maya, Alias, etc. on SGIs, though I thinkj various other channels do aswell. There were lots of CAD packages too of course, such as Ideas, CADDS5, ProE, CATIA, Magics, etc., but hobbyists tend to be more familiar with the animation modelling packages used for vfx, which is a shame as the same suites were used for a lot of design & engineering work aswell.
@@cybercat1531 I think the last version of Blender for IRIX was 2.45, though I normally install 2.44 as it's usefully faster.
Are you interested more in the software, or how it worked? Because... it depended a lot on the hardware, really. Like, running some 3D software on an Indy and running it on this machine (with the Elan3 graphics) would have been _very_ different experiences... this would have been much much more responsive. But probably still pretty slow compared to modern GPUs, thanks to 30 years of Mohr's law... At the time, though, it was impressive stuff. Maybe look for Maya 1.0 demos? That's a little later, but still. Or find making-of videos for Jurassic Park, Toy Story, etc., a lot of those will show some of the animation process -- which is much much lower quality than the eventual renders, but was usually very real-time interactive.
@@DavidLindes
I guess to put it simply: I want to see the software Rare/Nintendo used to create their promo art, and then do a sort of side-by-side comparison with modern day Blender.
To give an example, I've seen someone do this cool video where they do a doughnut in every major version of Blender, but I want to see it done with tools that were the industry standard at the time.
It just helps chart-out how much 3D software has improved over the years way more than a simple demo video or a behind-the-scenes video ever could (mostly because you don't see the limitations they had to work with), and I find it really fun to watch.
I feel your happiness when finally one gets to play with one of these. I got a chance to fix and keep for a year an O2 and an Indigo 2 with Monitors back in 1997. I was ecstatic.
Holy crap! My o2 was MADE in 97! Someone was rich! :P
@@GamingHelp Ha! I wish. I just lucked up and had a buddy who worked at a Big Cable company and they used them for something I don't remember. I was a computer tech at a local shop so he brought them to me to get working. I got to replace the Mobo in the O2. SGI Customer Service was top shelf. It was a great experience, I just wish I had a copy of Softimage to run on one back then. lol
My father worked for SGI from 1988 to around 1996. During that time our house was littered with SGI equipment and I remember having two Indigo 2's and an Iris in my room for many years. It was great trip down memory lane seeing all these demo's in use....I remember them well, thanks for sharing! For a time he was bringing home these huge machines that he had to rent cargo vans to pickup and move around...I believe they were "Challenge 10000's"? I have many great memories of me running extension cords to the van and then hanging out all night messing with flight simulators, tank simulators and submarine simulators. In hindsight I wish I would've made more of an effort to keep and preserve some of the numerous boxes of catalogs, promotional material, t-shirts, hats, etc etc that he had accumulated during that time - sadly, much of it was unceremoniously tossed in the early 2000's.
I feel your pain. Even though I was very familiar with the Indigo and SGI at the time (they were the de facto standard for 3D rendering of anything), I was actually an Amiga fanatic, had several of the 2000s, boxes full of software and books, an entire room dedicated to this stuff . . . but alas, it all got given away or just tossed in the early 2000s. Fun times they were . . .
Used to buy these for a high energy physics institute and they were cool/expensive at the time. Got a trip to visit SGI HQ in Mountain View.
Dude you are showing me all the things I played with as a newly minted sysadmin in the early 90's. I remember FSN and button fly.
I met two kids in highschool that borrowed money from dad, bought a SGI and started a VFX company in the 1990's... I would have dreamed of having one. At the time the best I had for rendering was a 386DX and it was really slow. The brothers from school had a 486 at the time I met them. I was working with early Ray Tracing that took forever to render a single frame but was often saved as a raw Targa file. TGA was 24bit, and 24bit color wasn't something that was cheap in the early days. There really wasn't a lot of options for decent graphics, and that what made the SGI computers so nice at the time.
1:51 Toward the end of analog TV stations and networks, every show segment that wasn't live, and every element in every show break was already digital and ingested to in-house storage. Everything played out of spreadsheets and dedicated TV equipment racks. These computers were part of that method.
As a former SGI Technician I have never see the red Indigo 2, but on some other models I have seen custom cases for specific customers. I do still have one of the many Indigo 2 I have owned over the years, kept this one because of how unique it is. It is a Impact R8000
I guess it would be technically correct to call it 'Power Impact' then, right?
@@PeechaLaCosh correct, thought they were such a limited run and I believe special ordered that they were shipped with or without that badging. Mine does not have the power badge, but it does have the impact and R8000 badge, but I had previously ones with the power badge.
Which OS version is it running please? Was there a particular OS release or patch which allowed IMPACT to be used with R8K?
@@mapesdhs597 Yeah, I think there was. My memory of that is a bit hazy, but I think it was IRIX 6.2 (or was it 6.3? 6.4?? Can't remember!)? Anyway, yeah, a rare gem indeed... but I had one at work (at SGI) for a while myself. Good times. :)
I had an indigo 2 on my desk for several years for molecular modeling. Of course it also had a flight simulator... That 3D demo demo brought back memories.
I was a UNIX admin at Fermi National Lab on the server farm and I managed 170 SGI servers and another 170 IBM RS6000, it was a super cool place to work. I'd love to have and old SGI sitting around too. Kids think I'm nuts when I tell them we had VR in the 90s although it cost $100K or so. Intergraph may have had it even earlier, used to work there as well.
We were swapping boards to upgrading a mainframe about 20 years ago. The tech doing said to me "do you want hold a board (memory ) worth 250k. 😀 The prices were insane
I used to work on Sun Sparcstations in the 90s and I was drooling at the idea of using one of these beasts!
Ah terrific! Yes I used SGI machines and also Sun Sparc. Good times 1989 to about 2007
SGI systems are so cool. I have an Indigo and Indy still, that a coworker gave me in 2006 (including a webcam, SGi CRT and the legendary 1600SW). It's fun to try and spot them in old movies. Aside from JP, Disclosure and Congo come to mind!
Also Twister of course. Funny how in some movies the company name badges get covered up, while in others the hw boasting is plain to see. The most cringe though is Lost in Space, with its verbal reference to SGI near the start of the movie.
"The dream of the 90's is alive in Portland." The perfect place to get a rare machine from the 90's.
In 1992 I was responsible for selecting a CADD system for my then employer. The choice was for graphics workstations from Hewlett-Packard. They were comparable to SGI products. A 3D modeling workstation consisted of two components, a CPU and a Graphics processor. The latter was the larger of the two and the pair occupied an equipment rack the size of a 2-drawer file cabinet. A 19" CRT monitor was the display. The system ran on HP-UX. The software was called ME10/30 (2D/3D apps) Five year later, after being fully amortized for tax purposes, those systems were replaced by software running on a PC.
I had the reverse problem with Sync-on-Green: I came into a 21" Sun monitor in the late 90s that I wanted to run on a PC. My solution at that time was to get a Matrox Millenium II PCI card, which was one of the few mainstream PC video cards that could output sync-on-green.
Afair not all Sun monitors did support sync-on-green. I only once was traveling with my Indy and I was lucky, the first monitor from a SPARCstation 2 did work. Then again, if not - there was a whole room of more monitors to try :-)
SGI had everyone on styling. Even their big servers were beautiful. I fell in love with SGI, when I was young and my friend was taking some graphic design courses and they used SGI O2s.
NeXT had way more tasteful and had timeless industrial design. But SGI was the archetype of 90’s design.
Worked for SGI when they acquired Alias|Wavefront and became a product specialist on their Maya project. This was groundbreaking and till this day still the biggest leap taken in 3D tech imho. I still have several old SGI's sitting in my office where my most precious one is a completely original Indy R5000 XZ. Everything down to the stress ball, cardboard cube and protective plastic is still there. I have such fond memories working for the company back when EVERYTHING was possible.
Ooh, which office? I was a sysadmin at Silicon Studio when it got folded in to A|W Mountain View. :)
@@DavidLindes Was working out of several different offices in Europe. Gent, London and Copenhagen.
@@talbech cool cool. :)
I was the demo artist in Chicago for Thompson Digital Image Explore. They wound up getting bought by Wavefront, whose code base actually went back to Able Image Research. I believe a considerable portion of the TDI development team went to work, creating what eventually became Maya.
@@midwestconcertvideo Huh, interesting. Reminds me of a -movie- miniseries called The Billion Dollar Code. You might appreciate it?? :)
Man, a certain number of years ago I worked at a research lab that used SGIs as servers and workstations. I worked at an Indigo like that. They were totally gorgeus and still are.
the interface and visuals of these unix'es are so great
Yeah, IRIX and the UIs on top of it were so much better than anything else available at the time. Heck, I think they might still be better than anything available now, in certain respects. I miss 4Dwm!
I worked at a VR headset startup in Seattle in 1995-1997 and we had two Indigo 2s, an Onyx for engineering and an Indy as the webserver. They were prototyping the designs on them and printed using a stereolithography 3D printer. I only had a user account on the Indy, but drooled over the other systems.
yippee my favorite niche computer youtuber grahh
Fellow Portlander, thanks for doing a video on this, for sure a top tier recommendation. Definitely looking to obtain and preserve one of these in the future. Happy to see a piece of history going to a safe and knowledgeable home :).
When i started working around 1998 my first workstation was a O2 and then a bit later an Octane. I really loved working with those. The Irix Os was the best Os i ever worked with.
I love old tech. I think it’s very important for us as humans to understand why we are where we are today in progress. Without that we will lose the basic knowledge that allows us to continue to innovate.
That was awesome all around. Love the jurassic park connections.
Thank you SO much for sharing this story. Brings back a lot of good memories
I had a rough day and this video makes me happy. Thanks for putting it out there!
I'm glad your videos showed up in my feed. I love retro pc's from growing up in the 90s. Your videos with the vaporwave background music is the chef's kiss.
Your personality seems like bringus if he took ritddlin; or Clint from LGR with too much coffee. I love your format. Please do not change it. 73.
6:18 i felt that anticipation during boot XD
i have couple MRI with SGI octane 1 and 2, is a new model of the Indigo. still working properly without any issues after 25 years
I had one of these on my desk back when it came out. Thanks for the video, to remind me of the old days :)
Love to see you play around with this absolute monster of a workstation, i have a couple SGI machines and it is loads of fun to play with :)
I used to have one of those in my lab when I worked at Micronet Technology. Fun fact, I visited SGI's headquarters once and it was the first office I ever visited that had espresso machines and Herman Miller Aeron chairs. They showed us an Onyx and demonstrated GRIO.
I sold them a Raidbank Pro.
I was a FEA Engineer (still am) in the late 90's as well as a UNIX Sysadmin around the time we phased these out... I ended up with two original Indigo's and a few Indigo2's as well as sun Sparcs, DEC Alphas, etc... it was sweet. This is till my all time favorite machine. If you can find an original 21" SGI Granite CRT, you will be in heaven.. You also haven't lived until you've had to install IRIX from scratch though... set aside most of an entire day. Sadly, the beasts are way to huge and I had to pass them along to other collectors over a decade ago. I've still got my backup DVD of the IRIX install disk-set just in case I get the urge to pick up another down the road.
It's amazing how powerful our stuff is now - How much we take for granted!
i had both of those at work...running CAM software back in the day....they were awesome.
I attended a film school in 1998-1999, and I remember we had some of the red Indigo 2s in our lab.
Oh... I remember working on those in university. Amazing computers!
My only personal experience with SGI systems was that a web hosting company I worked for in the very early 2000s hosted customer websites on them.
fun fact: when your core business involves doing graphics at the level SGI did it at, there was a side effect of being good at I/O in general, which... meant that SGI had core competencies that were well suited for high-end web serving (among other things). :)
Worked on one of these for about a year. very cool machine - insane at the time.
I used one of these in college, I remember it had a really cool graphical debugger that could help you visualize things like a linked list.
Fun video! I attended some training on SGI workstations at the SGI campus back in 1995(ish). They had something like 20 buildings at the time, and they were The Deal. Wish they were still around
this brings back memories... i worked on this and the onyx.
Used one of these back in the day. Never got used to the GUI. It was more Mac-like in style and likely why graphic designers found them more friendly. Personally, I preferred Sun Sparc workstations as they were more intuitive.
Really? Wow. I bet it's just a matter of what one was used to, then, because when I went from SGI (around the early IRIX 5.3 days) to Sun (Solaris 2.3 days), I found the latter to be _awful_ to me (by comparison -- I mean, it did have its good points, too, I just missed what I'd had). (So, I went back to SGI at my first opportunity. :D) So, maybe just a familiarity thing, for us both? (Though also, I think I might be able to point to some objective things where SGI was better... but I'm biased. ;) )
Thats the video I waited for since I saw the making of Jurassic Park as a kid
One of the most aesthetic computers ever made
one of my early memories was visiting my dad at work and playing tron on his SGI. It blew my mind back in the day!
I remember those days well . . . SGI was THE big name in high end 3D render engines, and the Indigo was the machine everyone lusted after. I was a regular participant in the annual SigGraph conferences, and SGI basically owned the show, their "booth" was more like an entire conference within the conference. It was unimaginable that SGI would eventually fade away . . . but alas.
What a glorious era of computing; these monster systems from this era are fantastic. I've a decent collection of Sun and HP Visualize workstations, but there is definitely a gap in the collection for some SGI's. Had a pair of Octanes many years ago but sold them when I needed space - major regret!
Ah, the 90’s when SGI was the coolest thing ever and in movies like Jurassic Park, Disclosure (Indy), and had mention in Lost in Space. I worked on SGI O2’s in college studying computer animation. But sadly my career in it never panned out. But that era? Ah! I miss it.
I've used all these beasts. Oh the memories.
Let me just point out the robustness of these machines and Iris 6.3 (5.x was 32 bit, 6.x was 64 bit).
I had on screen gauges monitoring all the CPUs, networking, and SCSI and fiber channel busses. Even pushing them all to 100%, simultaneously maxing out every aspect of the machine, both the UI and command line remained buttery smooth and responsive.
I spent thousands of hours working on Indigo2 workstations in the 90s. I still think Irix was the smoothest, most efficient OS I’ve ever used. It felt like betrayal having to move to NT at the end of the decade.
Now Microsoft is actually fearful of changing their codebase. Instead, coders create busywork like new interfaces. That's how we've ended up with several generations of settings and configuration interfaces channeling and weaving mysteriously through one another.
When I was in school in 2000, we used the indigo's in our render farm. Closest I ever got to one.
These were fantastic workhorses. Used one while I was at CST (Color Systems Technologies) to color B&W movies and some light visual effects. Also used one as a digital coloring station (mostly CD-Rom animation) while at 7th Level. Super easy to use and didn't crash too much. A solid machine.
Used to be lots of these around the Seattle area. Most were surplus from Boeing, who used them for CATIA. I used to have 4 of the purple version of the Indigo2, and still have one. Mine has an R4000 processor clocked at 250 MHz, with a then-massive 2MB of L2 cache.
Actually R4400, but yes indeed, though the Challenge/Onyx quad boards had 4MB. Btw, nowadays the PSUs in IMPACT systems are becoming very flakey, so keep an eye on it. If you have the skills, a recap is recommended. Also, the Dallas ICs are beginning to fail aswell, but thankfully modern replacements are cheap.
we had a couple Indigo2's on the shop floor we used for FlyThru. damn those were sweet machines.
@@dave928 I know of a couple of vis sim places that still use them, usually for added onscreen HUD elements and suchlike. One of them is a helicopter sim (the main image generator is an Onyx2, with two Indys and two Indigo2s doing other stuff).
Got to use these (or something under the same line) in college. I had no idea what they cost.
In 1993, we had AT286 machines. The world was so "static" back in those days. No annoying animations, because the hardware barely was capable of it. When we "scrolled" in MS Word, we had to wait 1-2 seconds while it repainted the page.
Years later I was astounded when I first saw a HP Unix worstation scrolling, panning dicuments like if it was a printed document on a real paper. I even hadn't known about these machine's existence. I saw the extremely expensive 486 om price list, but that was all. Some more years later I saw the first 3D VGA card in action.
I had no idea about SGI and how far they were ahead of everyone else in 3D graphics.
REALLY cool score dude. You own an amazing artifact.
I worked at my university's computing center back in the late 90s, and was always fascinated by SGI machines. To this day i still think their flocking screensaver (or whatever it was called) is the best screensaver I've ever seen. Man, i wish i could find the source code for that...
A fantastic game for the Indigo2 Impact was the "Certain Impact" WWI flight simulator. Back then it was incredibly impressive!
Loved this machine at the time!
I remembered having access to the original Iris Indigo around 1992, I think. We were awed by the power, but usually ended up just playing Viking MUD on it. 😁😁
Proud octane2 owner here ✋
this is sick another great video SGI INDIGO LESSS GOOOOOO
I worked with them at that time. SGI was the leader. I remember when their virtual background green screen came out.
Preserve it...
everyone's focusing on how stylish these machines were. they're missing the real reason for these machines: they could do modern multiwindowed productivity work a decade before it could be done on personal computers. imagine coding, compiling, testing, looking up documentation, etc. on a DOS machine, how many steps and waiting around that would have taken. Then compare to doing that on modern UNIX using these computers. that's how the $30,000 price could be justified.
That was one aspect. But in the early 90s PCs were still being crippled by the 16-bit architecture of Windows imposed by the MS-DOS foundation it was built on. At the same time SGIs did support 64-bit. Not everybody did gain from that but for quite a few customers it was the reason to go with SGI and nothing else.
Not totally correct I'm afraid.
Windows 3.11 was around and had multitasking.
@@ntsdt 3.11 has only cooperative multitasking, no memory protection, no journaling filesystem, still only 8+3 file names, filesize and disk size limitations, single user, primitive networking. IRIX was superior in every single point.
@@ntsdt it had cooperative multitasking, professional apps went over to windows really during the Windows 2000/XP era.
I remember these. So very expensive. We used to sell them to top t-shirt printers who wanted to print on black t-shirts. We sold a few! And some were stolen at premises!
They were cutting edge at the time and a must have in the industry. The crazy thing is that your phone has more power than it
I worked at an engineering company. We used SGI's Indigo's and Indy's for visualization workstations; the math and calculations were done by IBM RS6000's that took hours/days (and Gig's of diskspace) to run. I forget which RS6000 models but they were the server-class machines. I remember my boss, a non-engineer ex-Marine, flipping out at the cost of the SGI's. That was mid-1990's.
BTW, I agree about IRIX. Even now it's the best experience of any *nix windowing system.
I saw an SGI Personal Iris from the late 80s at VCF East this year - It was pretty cool!
Very interesting video, I'm really into old tech!
Did you sit on it? The PI made a pretty nice chair, as I recall. ;) (Granted, it was good for other things, too, back then!)
@@DavidLindes well it was on a table... but it IS huge so I'm sure it would have been a decent seat 😂
@@charliesretrocomputing Oh... why would it be on a table? I always knew them as under-desk machines... but if you slid them out (or maybe they even had wheels? I don't recall), they made a nice stool, basically.
@@DavidLindes There were tablecloths hanging over the edge of the table, tons of people in a crowded small space, and not much room with the chairs under the tables, that's probably why it was on top of the table... also, it's an exhibit so they probably want people to SEE the computer being presented 😂
@@charliesretrocomputing Ahh, I see. Fair. In my case, it was my mom's computer at work, so... the keyboard, mouse, and monitor were on the desk, and the computer was tucked away below. :)
When I was in college, the Manufacturing Systems department had these computers, but I did not work in that lab. I remember that they were expensive, and so was the software like I-Grip, and Alias. If I remember correctly the annual software licensing, upgrades, and maintenance was very expensive and like buying two brand new cars every year. I believe Alias was used to make Terminator 2.
Shortly after the turn of the century (early 2k) I picked up a Indigo 2 along with a IBM server with 4x Pentium Pros at a university auction. I was poor as hell so I'm sure I paid less than $100 for the pair but those two machines for a year or two were my "desktops". Yep a quad Pentium Pro 200 server with 512mb of RAM and a Indigo 2 were what I used as "desktops" and worked shocking well.
I wish I would have kept both as both are worth ridiculous money now for different reasons, but times change. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!!
the onyx graphics servers were beautiful
You sound so happy, grats! I used one in college doing visualization work for the math department. It was awesome learning GL from a book 3" thick.
I used one of these back in 1996 just for photoshop.
The internet had just about started to become a thing and graphic design agencies were in on the early action because their print clients were interested.
"Can you do me a website at the same time as my print brochure?"
And the flip side, print design agencies selling digital.
At that time, interactive CDROM's were a big deal - you'd give them away at trade shows or post them to prospective clients.
Suffice to say, to get any graphics done, even though I was using windows 95, I'd use the SGI Indigo 2 to do graphics in Photoshop 3.0.
The agency were too tight to splash out on another copy.
Also, that machine was used for video work, so I'd have to "book" a slot, as it was in constant use.
Around the same time, I recall a computer/tech exhibition where someone was hooked up to some wires on a stage, and as they moved, an Indigo 2 would be animating a skeleton in real time.
Or did I dream that? I'm sure I didn't - may have been a later SGI machine?
Fun times.
Wow I used one of those for my Thesis in '95 (on octree compressed voxel models + rendering them)... beast of a machine back then.
I used to work with them. There were no UI, everything based on short-cuts those computers. State of the art back then.
i have literally no use for one, but I've always wanted an SGI machine!
I worked for a TV station and went for training on the Indigo. In my class were also military personel that used it on the AWACS plane. That plane with the big antenna on top. I though it was cool that I was being trained with the big boys that keep us safe. They didn't share anything about how it was being used in the Airforce.
This brought back happy memories of my University CS department’s two Indy’s acquisition in 1993, one of which was upgraded to 24 bit graphics a years at a cost of £23,000 The CD drive alone cost £1200. One of the PhD students modelled flame simulation on these systems
That was the the monitor I had in the first system I built. It cost me $400 in 1996. thanks for the memories
Happy IRIX-tan noises 😄
It seems Nintendo borrowed from SGI more than just save file buttons in SM64, their entire logo for N64 was seemingly inspired by SGI's pipe cube logo.
Could be. They were working together on some things... I remember when a pre-release N64 showed up at the group I was supporting (who were working on Maya, as part of Alias|Wavefront, after SGI acquired them), and they gathered around while their team lead (who, IIRC, had a PhD in computer graphics?) would play Mario, and they were talking about intricate details of how the thing was performing -- and clipping and things. It was pretty funny. :)
I reached out the Silicon Graphics as a 13 years old- They sent me bags and bags of posters, pens, badges and other goodies! :-)
I appreciate your astolfo figure
Fantastic ... I have always wanted an SGI and SUN Microsystems unit ... don't know much about them but I think they are super cool and have a fantastic back story!!! Have fun with your new system!
I’d love to own a SGI. Someday. Keeping it in working order might be too much of a challenge though.
Very much depends on the system. Nowadays the most flakey (assuming one obtains a unit that has never been modified or refurbed, but somehow is still working) are IRIS Indigo, older Octanes, IMPACT Indigo2s (the PSU is the weak point in most cases) and Fuel (other issues aswell, SGI cheaped out on the design somewhat). As it happens one of the most reliable and usually still perfectly ok today is the older teal Indigo2, ie. the R4K model with pre-IMPACT graphics. I have a large number of IMPACT PSUs which need repair, but barely a handful of the non-IMPACT model. Indy will often still be ok aswell, though likely in need of a Dallas IC replacement; forums will tout the model with the Sony PSU as being better, but nowadays I suspect the opposite is the case, models with the NIDEC PSU are more likely to still be functional (due to a difference in how the fan cooling operates).
Probably the most trying of systems to own (though those who do would say it's part of the appeal) are the older high end systems such as Crimson, Challenge and Onyx2. The later Onyx2/Origin systems are more reliable and parts fairly cheap. After that it can vary, the final 3000 series can be pricey, though early versions are often cheap as continued commercial demand tends to focus on the final spec models.