I have a Personal Iris 4D25 that ran Vertigo 3D animation software. I bought it used in 1991 for $10,000 Canadian dollars from the Mini Computer exchange in Sunnyvail, Ca. Vertigo was around $7,000 at the time for the base package. It was the best investment I ever made.
Loved the video! I had a Personal IRIS all through graduate school. Everyone in our research center had one, but mine was special because it could do 24-bit graphics. Most of the others would only do 8-bit. Hard to believe how special and unique that was back then (early 90s). My heart warmed a bit in the part where the UI came-up on the monitor. It was definitely ahead of its time back then.
I've long wanted to just have one of these. I started working at Metrolight Studios Jan '92 and they gave us entry level guys these 8bit systems thinking it was all we needed for modeling but all the software ran like rubbish on them so a couple of us would basically work a double-shift to hop on a 4D/35 TG in the evenings and actually get some real work done. The 4D/35s were the Cadillac workstations in the office. Just a dream to use. Especially when they were running NeWS, which was Display Postscript like the NeXT. Windowing was sharp and fast and high performance. Less so when they switched to the more conventionally compatible Motif and X, which rendered older machines like the 4D/20 and 4D/25 painful to work on because it was more of a resource hog. But I'd still love to have a working 4D/35 running Wavefront Advanced Visualizer, just as a reminder of how far things have come. I have to say though, there was an elegance in the simplicity of a lot of that old software and UIs tuned for 19-21" CRT monitors.
Hey Sean, thanks for sharing your memories! I have a copy of Wavefront TAV running on my Octane. I was wondering if you have a user's guide for it? Can I email you and ask a few questions regarding the TAV?
@@PeechaLaCosh I never saw any sort of user's guide. We had manuals but I never actually looked at one much. I just picked up the basics for how keyframes worked, which is different than any other DCC I've ever seen because I remember you applied or set keyframes, then manually ran an interpolation over those, but it was an explicit baking process with per-frame data generated, not live spline curves. You had to re-apply keys while they were still in memory, in case you wanted to do a different interpolation or tweak the keyframe values, otherwise you lost them. I picked up Preview and (I think it was called simply) Model(er) this way, with pointers, watching one of the seniors or just intuition and trial/experimentation. I never used the renderer, I don't think even once, because we had a very high performance scanline renderer made in-house at Metrolight. TAV is actually a fork of the animation tools that were developed at Robert Abel & Associates. Kovacs, who started Wavefront, was one of the original authors of some of the Abel tools and had enough ownership (or clout) that when he left he was able to take a fork of the source and start Wavefront. And as the Abel tools started out as camera motion control previsualization software, the whole keyframe and interpolation scheme worked, I guess, like moco software, not how 3D DCCs would eventually evolve. I seem to remember watching some of the stage guys at DD running Kuper software and it maybe worked more like TAV in this respect. But that's all I remember, because I only used TAV for animation and modeling, along with Alias software and lots of in-house tools, between Jan. 1992 and around June of 1993 when I joined DD during its initial start-up, and switched to Prisms (which started as a fork of the Omnibus studio tools, and later became Houdini). Prior to that I'd only used various Amiga DCCs like Videoscape 3D (which became Lightwave), Imagine 3D, Animation:Journeyman, Caligari and Lightwave.
I have several old SGI's sitting in my office for display. My pride in an old SGI Indy R5000 XZ. Everything original even the stress ball, packaging and monitor. Completely as you would receive it from SGI back in the days. I used to work for SGI as a product specialist on the Alias|Wavefront products and this system was given to me for demo purposes. It was however never really used, cause the O2 was launched not long after and the sales department preferred to do demos on the much faster graphics of those machines. The O2s were also much easier for us to take on the road for demo sessions.
People take for granted that in 2021 anything can do image and vision processing which is critical in solving problems and automating systems and manufacturing. Having that type of computing in the 80s must have been insane and those people were actually creative and could do a lot with very little. You have to put yourselves in their shoe AND hell NO you wouldn't get hired as the costs would have been too high to train you/give you time in front of these machines. The best 99% of us could do is maybe be a technician somewhere, like cray etc. Maybe.. however you would have gotten 40K a year with benefits IN 80s money and secure employment. Think a 120K a year in todays money in some cheap state. I guess we can maybe catch up by investing in bitcoin but you get my point, lol
Of all the things to go wrong the power supply would certainly be the preferred one. Thats something that most electronics repair places should be able to fix, unlike any of the computey bits. I hope you kept the orig and got someone to fix it for ya. Really cool to see this.
This is definitely geek porn, and I mean that as a high compliment. I grew up coding on Z-80 and 8080 machines in assembly. I was so jealous of the 68000 CPU because it had a hardware multiply and divide. GREAT video! All good wishes.
This is super geeky and right up my alley. I am a huge SGI fan. Thank you for making this and sharing it. Your enthusiasm when it starts to boot brought a huge smile to my face.
Very cool machine. Back up the drives, as they're the weakest link in the chain, then clone the drives to one or more logical drives provisioned from a (comparatively huge) SD card running on a SCSI2SD adapter. That's what I did for my MacSE, Amiga 3000 and my IRIS Indy (which incidentally use the same wd33c93 SCSI controller as my Amiga 3000) and it's works great. I miss the sound of those old drives (though not the seek latency), but being electromechanical in nature, things like lubricants have broken down with age (not to mention the tendency of some brands, like Conner, to have bunk caps). Part of the fun of these old "barn finds" where the system was left untouched after decommissioning, is having everything as it was. It's like a time capsule.
In college, I had a friend who did that sort of power supply hack to resurrect a PDP-11/45 that we managed to find discarded :-) (Of course these days, I'm used to watching electronics vloggers who would actually throw that dead PSU on the bench and try to fix it.)
This is such a cool video. #1 is the subject - you are right, you never see SGI workstations of this age any more. Awesome hardware tear down. Love your non-edits (split second text corrections of errors). Didnt know the factoid about Andy Bechtolsheim. And then some crazy jury rigging to get this thing going. Was horrified for a few seconds when you said "this is not PS/2" with the keyboard/mouse. Love this so much. If you ever wanna sell this thing get in touch :)
I did use briefly a personal iris for work, until we moved to indego workstations. It was a nice machine. You should feel the weight on the Octane its even more rediculas than the iris.
Yup Octanes are a boat anchor, and bigger than ppl think from pics. I also had an ONYX which was damn near impossible to move with 2 guys, I hated the side panels that kept spontaneously falling off the damn thing.
Nice video rather enjoyed that one, also its great to see a fellow sgi owner out there. I'd love to lay my hands on a Iris, bit I've picked up a few sgi machines over the years, I've got a Octane2 and an O2, I also have alot of parts for an indego but not everything I need to get a functioning system.
That's awesome. I was excited with you watching it boot! This makes me optimistic that I can repair my old SGI by replacing the PSU. Maybe you could talk a bit more about how you connected the industrial PSUs to the rest of the hardware? I mean, it's probably pretty straight forward when you have the pinout. But I'm wondering how exactly you did (using the original connector?) Anyway, thank you for sharing this!
Nice job. We used to target Irix with our Subsurface modelling and Mapping software back in the day. Also targeted Solaris and this new OS called Windows. 😁
A place that I worked for in the early 2000s used to get lots of nice old goodies, SGI, SUN and even Micro Vax systems in for recycling/resale. I could have taken home all of them for supper cheap prices too.
Dude, it’s awesome to see you got as far as you did with it! I’ve wanted to collect an SGI system for a few years now, but since they’ve become genuine collectors status, that opportunity has likely come and gone. Very good to see this one in the care of someone doing right by it. Subscribed!
There is a Granite SGI monitor on eBay at the moment for only £250! These things are rare as anything and real expensive... if only I had the room for it - it's a 30kg monster! :(
I owned a Power Series 4D/310 GTX in the past. It was upgraded with the IP17 R4400 CPU board from the Crimson. Unfortunately i fried the GTX graphics subsystem by running it from an ungrounded socket. Still own the front door and the cpu board though. I considered upgrading it with a Reality Engine boardset, but decided against it as the RM4 texture boards are dying.
Your viewers may be surprised to learn that Personal IRIS systems are still in commercial use around the world, mainly for industrial process control, including factory floor systems, PCB manufacturing, textile production and also vis sim. I'm in the midst of fixing an IP12 board at the moment.
At the company I was working for 1993 I organised a test installation of PTC Pro/Engineer 3D CAD software. And it came on this machine. That was something back then when the IBM PC-AT was the most powerful computer we had. I was fascinated with smoothness of 3D shaded object manipulation on screen and overall speed of the workstation. A year before I tested Hewlett Packard series 9000-380 workstation with TurboSRX graphics option. The graphics subsystem of HP workstation was three times as big as the Personal Iris to achieve roughly same performance. And Personal Iris came with first optical mouse that I saw in my life. It used a mousepad made from aluminium with fine raster printed on it. And the desktop was zoomable! It uses vector graphics for the icons and one was able to zoom-in and zoom-out the desktop without graphic quality degradation. And yes, it uses GL as graphics library, which was later put in open domain and is omnipresent in 3D computing world today. I was simply enchanted with this machine…
Aw yeah, dude! I actually used Pro-E (it’s called Creo, now) in my last day job in automotive R&D. They used Pro-E for drivetrain and Catia for body, and I would love to see the old Unix versions of both. Actually, I believe the O2 I got from the same guy has a copy of Catia, but the license is long dead.
Worked on one of those in 1993 doing renders for 3D prototypes (although it was used primarily for creating 3D printing files, they also used it for marketing visualizations). Quite the beast. Miss the OS - it shared a lot with NeXTstep - including the vert-tab menus - which I still miss today (scrolling to the top of monitors today for menus is pointless and archaic - doubly so considering a solution existed 30 years ago).
Congrats on resurrecting the PI. I wouldn't give up on the original PSU just yet tho -- check the electrolytics, rectifier, chopper tranny, etc. The usual suspects. That said, I've never found schematics for SGI's PSUs (which were actually OEM'd from Cherokee, Power One, and a few others). These old SGIs are high maintenance. I have a Crimson RE that's been driving me up the wall, basically coming up with new faults every time it's booted (which is rare these days). The fact hardware docs are scarce doesn't help. I've never come across detailed hardware documentation or even schematics for these early machines, at least not beyond what's in the Hardware Developer's Manual. The striping in the graphics console is a typical fault in early SGIs, and I've seen it on Reality Engine and VGX. If you're lucky, you'll just need to reseat some RAM on the graphics board. More likely tho, that RAM has gone bad. Finding the culprit can be a real challenge, but at least PIs are still TTL and not SMD (unlike later generations), so anyone with adept soldering skills, patience, and proper observance of ESD precautions could replace them. Another thing: BACK UP THOSE DISKS! These Seagate Wrens (probably ST4767s) are prone to failure. I keep an old PC around with a SCSI adapter running linux to dump old drives via dd. Good luck and cherish your PI! :^)
This has already been done with the P.I., but one must find a particular type of slightly older ATX unit in order for the mod to work. Modern ATX units don't have sufficiently high current limits on voltage rails which are not used so much in modern systems. I'm using such a modded ATX setup with my own P.I. test rig.
5:25 not so odd, you can remove an secondary drive while your computer is on by ejecting it, you cant do that on your primary driver. (well at least on linux you can, this is a unix system so it should be similiar)
It would be cool to get someone to build a proper power supply to this machine. Have you made any progress? would love to see it working. does it use regular vga monitors? its a miracle that these hdds still work.
Remember Indy can use up to IRIX 6.5.22, though for lesser spec machines 6.2 will feel a lot more responsive, ditto 5.3. Btw, do you happen to have the version of 5.3 for R5000 Indy which includes XFS support? The installation CD I mean?
@@VSigma725 Ah, your OP read as if you were using 5.3.The 6.5.x updates do add some useful things over 6.5, especially bug fixes, and also DVD support (plus the Nekoware needs 6.5.22 minimum), though the performance is basically the same as running 6.5.
Nice video! You beat me to my perpetually delayed P.I. video that I'm probably too lazy to ever publish. Every P.I. I've worked on or seen used has a rusted exterior edge on the mainboard. Also looks like you have magnum audio, which is super rare. Now can you get a SCSI2SD running IRIX 5.3 and Doom running on it? :-)
Awesome video. Do you think you're going to eventually get the PSU jan-jaap recommended so you can use the machine while it's buttoned up or do you have other plans? I really need to get around to fixing the power supply in my R3000 Indigo at some point.
love your videos .. you are sooo enthusiastic about those old machines .. I would love to see the old power supply getting fixed so the machine could be whole again. may be a collaboration with some other youtuber?
Grazie per il video, ricordo quella SGI e cosa riusciva a fare ai suoi tempi; l'unico computer che mi potevo permettere era un Amiga 2000 dotato di 68030 e gpu
@TrackZero ▶ Just a thought, instead of videoing an ancient crt, you could develop an rs232 pass through adapter, so you can intercept the console traffic for a video grab off an intermediate pc window. This might be a more pleasing rendition for your viewers.
It's kind of weird, back then you thought SGI was hawt, but also a total dawg. You wanted to love one, but you knew there was absolutely no software available for them so it was an overpriced dead end experience... Unlike say a Macintosh Tower Workstation, which though it had no 3D, was an absolute dream environment to be in. At least it was for me, I pirated an entire software store of it's Macintosh software. My Mac and printer at the time blew every SGI away for what it actually... could do. Now, I guess if you were Industrial Light and Magic and spend hundreds of thousands to buy SGI, and then also... and here's the kicker... hire developers to actually code the software you needed to do the 3D work you wanted, SGI was the only game in town. You pretty much had to write your own software to take advantage of that 3D hardware. At least that was my perception at the time. I had a chance to push an SGI workstation on a rolly cart at the exit of a computer museum one time that was just sitting there unused... already on the rolly cart, unplugged, no security cams, exit door right there, nobody around... and I passed on it. I knew when I got it home, it'd be just a neat purple box, without software, there really was nothing you could do on it... Maybe leave it on all the time, host your websites I guess, play around in a text editor or on the command line. I could do all that with MachTen BSD on the Mac already anyway...
cool, this probably the oldest "working" SGI I have seen on youtube. I remember seeing an entire logic box of Personal IRIS listing on ebay last year as parts but it gone in less than 1 week after I seen it.
2:54 what is "Back toll shim"? Can't you 'Muricans never even TRY (!) to pronounce foreign names correctly? It is pronounced "Baech" ("ch" like a hissing cat), "tolls", and "hime" (with the "ime" like in "dime"). So difficult?
John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
I have a Personal Iris 4D25 that ran Vertigo 3D animation software. I bought it used in 1991 for $10,000 Canadian dollars from the Mini Computer exchange in Sunnyvail, Ca. Vertigo was around $7,000 at the time for the base package. It was the best investment I ever made.
Loved the video! I had a Personal IRIS all through graduate school. Everyone in our research center had one, but mine was special because it could do 24-bit graphics. Most of the others would only do 8-bit. Hard to believe how special and unique that was back then (early 90s). My heart warmed a bit in the part where the UI came-up on the monitor. It was definitely ahead of its time back then.
SGI certainly felt that expensive things should be heavy, even the bubbly little O2 had some gravity to it.
I've long wanted to just have one of these. I started working at Metrolight Studios Jan '92 and they gave us entry level guys these 8bit systems thinking it was all we needed for modeling but all the software ran like rubbish on them so a couple of us would basically work a double-shift to hop on a 4D/35 TG in the evenings and actually get some real work done. The 4D/35s were the Cadillac workstations in the office. Just a dream to use. Especially when they were running NeWS, which was Display Postscript like the NeXT. Windowing was sharp and fast and high performance. Less so when they switched to the more conventionally compatible Motif and X, which rendered older machines like the 4D/20 and 4D/25 painful to work on because it was more of a resource hog.
But I'd still love to have a working 4D/35 running Wavefront Advanced Visualizer, just as a reminder of how far things have come. I have to say though, there was an elegance in the simplicity of a lot of that old software and UIs tuned for 19-21" CRT monitors.
Hey Sean, thanks for sharing your memories! I have a copy of Wavefront TAV running on my Octane. I was wondering if you have a user's guide for it? Can I email you and ask a few questions regarding the TAV?
@@PeechaLaCosh I never saw any sort of user's guide. We had manuals but I never actually looked at one much. I just picked up the basics for how keyframes worked, which is different than any other DCC I've ever seen because I remember you applied or set keyframes, then manually ran an interpolation over those, but it was an explicit baking process with per-frame data generated, not live spline curves. You had to re-apply keys while they were still in memory, in case you wanted to do a different interpolation or tweak the keyframe values, otherwise you lost them. I picked up Preview and (I think it was called simply) Model(er) this way, with pointers, watching one of the seniors or just intuition and trial/experimentation. I never used the renderer, I don't think even once, because we had a very high performance scanline renderer made in-house at Metrolight.
TAV is actually a fork of the animation tools that were developed at Robert Abel & Associates. Kovacs, who started Wavefront, was one of the original authors of some of the Abel tools and had enough ownership (or clout) that when he left he was able to take a fork of the source and start Wavefront. And as the Abel tools started out as camera motion control previsualization software, the whole keyframe and interpolation scheme worked, I guess, like moco software, not how 3D DCCs would eventually evolve. I seem to remember watching some of the stage guys at DD running Kuper software and it maybe worked more like TAV in this respect.
But that's all I remember, because I only used TAV for animation and modeling, along with Alias software and lots of in-house tools, between Jan. 1992 and around June of 1993 when I joined DD during its initial start-up, and switched to Prisms (which started as a fork of the Omnibus studio tools, and later became Houdini). Prior to that I'd only used various Amiga DCCs like Videoscape 3D (which became Lightwave), Imagine 3D, Animation:Journeyman, Caligari and Lightwave.
I have several old SGI's sitting in my office for display. My pride in an old SGI Indy R5000 XZ. Everything original even the stress ball, packaging and monitor. Completely as you would receive it from SGI back in the days. I used to work for SGI as a product specialist on the Alias|Wavefront products and this system was given to me for demo purposes. It was however never really used, cause the O2 was launched not long after and the sales department preferred to do demos on the much faster graphics of those machines. The O2s were also much easier for us to take on the road for demo sessions.
People take for granted that in 2021 anything can do image and vision processing which is critical in solving problems and automating systems and manufacturing. Having that type of computing in the 80s must have been insane and those people were actually creative and could do a lot with very little. You have to put yourselves in their shoe AND hell NO you wouldn't get hired as the costs would have been too high to train you/give you time in front of these machines. The best 99% of us could do is maybe be a technician somewhere, like cray etc. Maybe.. however you would have gotten 40K a year with benefits IN 80s money and secure employment. Think a 120K a year in todays money in some cheap state. I guess we can maybe catch up by investing in bitcoin but you get my point, lol
Of all the things to go wrong the power supply would certainly be the preferred one. Thats something that most electronics repair places should be able to fix, unlike any of the computey bits. I hope you kept the orig and got someone to fix it for ya. Really cool to see this.
This is definitely geek porn, and I mean that as a high compliment. I grew up coding on Z-80 and 8080 machines in assembly. I was so jealous of the 68000 CPU because it had a hardware multiply and divide. GREAT video! All good wishes.
This is super geeky and right up my alley. I am a huge SGI fan. Thank you for making this and sharing it. Your enthusiasm when it starts to boot brought a huge smile to my face.
Very cool machine. Back up the drives, as they're the weakest link in the chain, then clone the drives to one or more logical drives provisioned from a (comparatively huge) SD card running on a SCSI2SD adapter. That's what I did for my MacSE, Amiga 3000 and my IRIS Indy (which incidentally use the same wd33c93 SCSI controller as my Amiga 3000) and it's works great. I miss the sound of those old drives (though not the seek latency), but being electromechanical in nature, things like lubricants have broken down with age (not to mention the tendency of some brands, like Conner, to have bunk caps). Part of the fun of these old "barn finds" where the system was left untouched after decommissioning, is having everything as it was. It's like a time capsule.
In college, I had a friend who did that sort of power supply hack to resurrect a PDP-11/45 that we managed to find discarded :-)
(Of course these days, I'm used to watching electronics vloggers who would actually throw that dead PSU on the bench and try to fix it.)
I want to be able to work on it, but I'm too wuss. I need proper high voltage probes for my scope.
Excellent work. Glad to see the old hardware being brought to life again.
This is such a cool video. #1 is the subject - you are right, you never see SGI workstations of this age any more. Awesome hardware tear down. Love your non-edits (split second text corrections of errors). Didnt know the factoid about Andy Bechtolsheim. And then some crazy jury rigging to get this thing going. Was horrified for a few seconds when you said "this is not PS/2" with the keyboard/mouse. Love this so much. If you ever wanna sell this thing get in touch :)
I did use briefly a personal iris for work, until we moved to indego workstations. It was a nice machine. You should feel the weight on the Octane its even more rediculas than the iris.
Yup Octanes are a boat anchor, and bigger than ppl think from pics. I also had an ONYX which was damn near impossible to move with 2 guys, I hated the side panels that kept spontaneously falling off the damn thing.
Nice video rather enjoyed that one, also its great to see a fellow sgi owner out there. I'd love to lay my hands on a Iris, bit I've picked up a few sgi machines over the years, I've got a Octane2 and an O2, I also have alot of parts for an indego but not everything I need to get a functioning system.
What an incredible historical piece of computing right there, very neat you got it up and running
That's awesome. I was excited with you watching it boot! This makes me optimistic that I can repair my old SGI by replacing the PSU.
Maybe you could talk a bit more about how you connected the industrial PSUs to the rest of the hardware? I mean, it's probably pretty straight forward when you have the pinout. But I'm wondering how exactly you did (using the original connector?)
Anyway, thank you for sharing this!
Nice job. We used to target Irix with our Subsurface modelling and Mapping software back in the day. Also targeted Solaris and this new OS called Windows. 😁
A place that I worked for in the early 2000s used to get lots of nice old goodies, SGI, SUN and even Micro Vax systems in for recycling/resale. I could have taken home all of them for supper cheap prices too.
Great video! I have some nostalgic feelings for SGI systems since I used to work on them back in the early 90s in university.
Good to see another Pi running again. Well done! Keep loving it and keeping it running.
Dude, it’s awesome to see you got as far as you did with it! I’ve wanted to collect an SGI system for a few years now, but since they’ve become genuine collectors status, that opportunity has likely come and gone. Very good to see this one in the care of someone doing right by it.
Subscribed!
Amazing to see a Personal Iris running! Looking forward to seeing more :)
This was the first sgi I worked with in the early 90s.
There is a Granite SGI monitor on eBay at the moment for only £250! These things are rare as anything and real expensive... if only I had the room for it - it's a 30kg monster! :(
As constructive criticism just re record the beginning rather than text corrections unless your upload schedule is crammed.
I owned a Power Series 4D/310 GTX in the past. It was upgraded with the IP17 R4400 CPU board from the Crimson. Unfortunately i fried the GTX graphics subsystem by running it from an ungrounded socket. Still own the front door and the cpu board though.
I considered upgrading it with a Reality Engine boardset, but decided against it as the RM4 texture boards are dying.
Your viewers may be surprised to learn that Personal IRIS systems are still in commercial use around the world, mainly for industrial process control, including factory floor systems, PCB manufacturing, textile production and also vis sim. I'm in the midst of fixing an IP12 board at the moment.
Awesome machine 👌😍 well done
At the company I was working for 1993 I organised a test installation of PTC Pro/Engineer 3D CAD software. And it came on this machine. That was something back then when the IBM PC-AT was the most powerful computer we had. I was fascinated with smoothness of 3D shaded object manipulation on screen and overall speed of the workstation. A year before I tested Hewlett Packard series 9000-380 workstation with TurboSRX graphics option. The graphics subsystem of HP workstation was three times as big as the Personal Iris to achieve roughly same performance. And Personal Iris came with first optical mouse that I saw in my life. It used a mousepad made from aluminium with fine raster printed on it. And the desktop was zoomable! It uses vector graphics for the icons and one was able to zoom-in and zoom-out the desktop without graphic quality degradation. And yes, it uses GL as graphics library, which was later put in open domain and is omnipresent in 3D computing world today. I was simply enchanted with this machine…
Aw yeah, dude! I actually used Pro-E (it’s called Creo, now) in my last day job in automotive R&D. They used Pro-E for drivetrain and Catia for body, and I would love to see the old Unix versions of both.
Actually, I believe the O2 I got from the same guy has a copy of Catia, but the license is long dead.
Worked on one of those in 1993 doing renders for 3D prototypes (although it was used primarily for creating 3D printing files, they also used it for marketing visualizations). Quite the beast. Miss the OS - it shared a lot with NeXTstep - including the vert-tab menus - which I still miss today (scrolling to the top of monitors today for menus is pointless and archaic - doubly so considering a solution existed 30 years ago).
Aweseome! Thank you from a Silicon Graphics Fan in Germany ❤👍
A 4D/35 GT was the first SGI that I ever used. Absolutely revolutionary machine when it was new.
Great video! I love the SGI gear. I have an Indigo Elan that came with a mouse but no keyboard, so opposite of your situation.
Great job on the powerup!
Congrats on resurrecting the PI. I wouldn't give up on the original PSU just yet tho -- check the electrolytics, rectifier, chopper tranny, etc. The usual suspects. That said, I've never found schematics for SGI's PSUs (which were actually OEM'd from Cherokee, Power One, and a few others).
These old SGIs are high maintenance. I have a Crimson RE that's been driving me up the wall, basically coming up with new faults every time it's booted (which is rare these days). The fact hardware docs are scarce doesn't help. I've never come across detailed hardware documentation or even schematics for these early machines, at least not beyond what's in the Hardware Developer's Manual.
The striping in the graphics console is a typical fault in early SGIs, and I've seen it on Reality Engine and VGX. If you're lucky, you'll just need to reseat some RAM on the graphics board. More likely tho, that RAM has gone bad. Finding the culprit can be a real challenge, but at least PIs are still TTL and not SMD (unlike later generations), so anyone with adept soldering skills, patience, and proper observance of ESD precautions could replace them.
Another thing: BACK UP THOSE DISKS! These Seagate Wrens (probably ST4767s) are prone to failure. I keep an old PC around with a SCSI adapter running linux to dump old drives via dd.
Good luck and cherish your PI! :^)
Hey kudos! Nice video! I wish some enthusiasts would team together to design PSU replacements for these old machines
This has already been done with the P.I., but one must find a particular type of slightly older ATX unit in order for the mod to work. Modern ATX units don't have sufficiently high current limits on voltage rails which are not used so much in modern systems. I'm using such a modded ATX setup with my own P.I. test rig.
You have a really good friend. I hope you enjoy it.
Wow. Used vertigo on one of these to create broadcast video animations. Rendering each frame to betacam sp
5:25 not so odd, you can remove an secondary drive while your computer is on by ejecting it, you cant do that on your primary driver.
(well at least on linux you can, this is a unix system so it should be similiar)
You have a great voice narration....👍
CDE looks so cool!
It would be cool to get someone to build a proper power supply to this machine. Have you made any progress? would love to see it working. does it use regular vga monitors? its a miracle that these hdds still work.
IRIX 5.3? Wow, crazy this machine has the same OS as my Indy R5000 when the Indy is almost 10 years newer.
Remember Indy can use up to IRIX 6.5.22, though for lesser spec machines 6.2 will feel a lot more responsive, ditto 5.3.
Btw, do you happen to have the version of 5.3 for R5000 Indy which includes XFS support? The installation CD I mean?
@@mapesdhs597 Nope, the only version of IRIX I have CDs for is 6.5.
@@VSigma725 Ah, your OP read as if you were using 5.3.The 6.5.x updates do add some useful things over 6.5, especially bug fixes, and also DVD support (plus the Nekoware needs 6.5.22 minimum), though the performance is basically the same as running 6.5.
That is nuts!
Cool thing is the SGi emulation system that can emulate different systems and boot IRIS
Good stuff!
Do you plan to install IRIX 3.3 on this machine? Personal IRIS is probably the last serie to support 4Sight, the SGI's fork of Sun NeWS.
All these Auld RISC boxes feel like they're carved out of sheer metal. I have to do warm-ups and stretches before moving any of them.
Nice video! You beat me to my perpetually delayed P.I. video that I'm probably too lazy to ever publish. Every P.I. I've worked on or seen used has a rusted exterior edge on the mainboard. Also looks like you have magnum audio, which is super rare. Now can you get a SCSI2SD running IRIX 5.3 and Doom running on it? :-)
Cool stuff! Loves to see the detailed look on a iconic machine. And I also love to see you using a ThinkPad. Best to get! T4x series or T6x?
Love your content. But for me the star of the show is the thinkpad running NetBSD and CDE. So cool.
Awesome video. Do you think you're going to eventually get the PSU jan-jaap recommended so you can use the machine while it's buttoned up or do you have other plans? I really need to get around to fixing the power supply in my R3000 Indigo at some point.
love your videos .. you are sooo enthusiastic about those old machines ..
I would love to see the old power supply getting fixed so the machine could be whole again. may be a collaboration with some other youtuber?
Grazie per il video, ricordo quella SGI e cosa riusciva a fare ai suoi tempi; l'unico computer che mi potevo permettere era un Amiga 2000 dotato di 68030 e gpu
Wonderful machine, but I would rather have my Crimson
@TrackZero
▶ Just a thought, instead of videoing an ancient crt, you could develop an rs232 pass through adapter, so you can intercept the console traffic for a video grab off an intermediate pc window. This might be a more pleasing rendition for your viewers.
I know someone who own this machine and he fixed the PSU by changing all caps in it.
This system could probably pull off Terminator 2 Visual Effects.
Awesome! Backup that hard drive(s) on some external system!
A very very awesome boxen.
Awesome
How is the hernia?.
you should type up a script for one of your next shows on this machine... :)
Did you know Super Mario 64 was developed on an SGI MIPS system? In fact, the rabbit in the basement was named Mips as a tribute.
Probably the most expensive dev platform for a console in the history of consoles. Ouch.
@@mgabrysSF The modified Onyx was, but the Indy with the proper board wasn't that costly.
Somewhat unsurprising, though, given that the N64 was itself a MIPS box.
Expensive boat anchor
Cute jammies 😊
I was figuring I would get comments about that the moment I uploaded, and yet somehow it took like two years for anyone to mention it.
WOW!
4:02 You have a copy of the Red Dragon Book. What edition is that?
nice!!! can repair the powersupply?
update on the iris? you doing anything interesting with it?
Nice
Please link the psu post you put up in video please.
It's kind of weird, back then you thought SGI was hawt, but also a total dawg.
You wanted to love one, but you knew there was absolutely no software available for them so it was an overpriced dead end experience...
Unlike say a Macintosh Tower Workstation, which though it had no 3D, was an absolute dream environment to be in.
At least it was for me, I pirated an entire software store of it's Macintosh software. My Mac and printer at the time blew every SGI away for what it actually... could do.
Now, I guess if you were Industrial Light and Magic and spend hundreds of thousands to buy SGI, and then also... and here's the kicker... hire developers to actually code the software you needed to do the 3D work you wanted, SGI was the only game in town. You pretty much had to write your own software to take advantage of that 3D hardware. At least that was my perception at the time.
I had a chance to push an SGI workstation on a rolly cart at the exit of a computer museum one time that was just sitting there unused... already on the rolly cart, unplugged, no security cams, exit door right there, nobody around... and I passed on it. I knew when I got it home, it'd be just a neat purple box, without software, there really was nothing you could do on it...
Maybe leave it on all the time, host your websites I guess, play around in a text editor or on the command line. I could do all that with MachTen BSD on the Mac already anyway...
Next vidéo cleaning all that rust ( SMR ) and reccaping the board, then start modeling a 3D model ?
Crimson boost !!!!!!!
I remember playing with this thing when learning 3D using TDI in the early 90s....this thing is noisy as hell!
I used TDI too 😀
that hard drive aint fuckin around
How do you know the password to the system?
The OS is called "I-ricks" not "Ear-wax"
Wow you got CDE running!
Wow 12.5 mhz ..
But but but, can it run Crysyis ?
Definitely not as accessible as later SGI units.
cool, this probably the oldest "working" SGI I have seen on youtube.
I remember seeing an entire logic box of Personal IRIS listing on ebay last year as parts but it gone in less than 1 week after I seen it.
Just set some mousetraps and get a damn
Eye ricks
Honestly, I don’t even like my pronunciation. But it’s embedded into my brain and functionally too late to change now.
there is one right now on e b a y for 1200$ USD :) from Israel
It has Binance logo on it
2:54 what is "Back toll shim"? Can't you 'Muricans never even TRY (!) to pronounce foreign names correctly? It is pronounced "Baech" ("ch" like a hissing cat), "tolls", and "hime" (with the "ime" like in "dime"). So difficult?
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.