HN Reader

7 months agoby ingve

> “a 64MB POWER Indigo 2 with XZ Graphics and a 2GB SCSI drive would run you around £58,000”

And then you had to buy the software. A license for a 3D modeling package like Softimage or Alias cost at least $10-15k, and you probably also needed a separate raytracing package for high-quality output.

Someone is selling a copy of Alias for SGI for $2500 on eBay today: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335622694059

But if, in 1994, you did have an SGI and Alias and enough artistic skill and technical competence (and patience…) to produce liquid logos and dancing soda bottles and face morphs, you would certainly recoup that $80k investment quickly. It was a very rare skill that needed very rare hardware. You could get highly paid freelance work by simply calling up ad agencies.

That scarcity a bit hard to imagine today, when anyone can download Blender onto their standard desktop computer and learn it by watching online videos. It’s cool that 3D art has been thoroughly democratized.

7 months agoby pavlov

One thing I miss from that era of machines was just the way they looked: at the time, most machines were grey or black boxes, but the SGIs had some degree of personality to them. The O2's were fun little curvy boxes. One of my favorites were the large rack systems - one of my jobs had us working with the Origin 2000 and PowerChallenge machines. Compared to some of the generic clusters of rack mounted Alpha systems that we had around the same time, the SGIs just had a cool look to them.

7 months agoby porcoda

This brings back memories. Back around the same time in the mid-90’s I remember visiting a post-production company, who had multiple SGI Onyx supercomputers in their stylish glass walled server room, dedicated to processing special effects for film and advertising.

They were so expensive they only made sense to run 24/7/365 in order to get their money’s worth. They had a service engineer on call permanently who wasn’t allowed to be further away than 25 miles from the servers at any time.

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/onyxgs.html

7 months agoby junto

Lovely system, the R8000 is indeed a rare bird.. given the hype not a particularly remarkable CPU by any measure versus its contemporaries at launch (Alpha A21064A, IBM POWER2 and HP PA-RISC all traded heavy blows in that era, SPARC seemed perpetually behind) but would be a nice one to score. It was an interesting time as Alpha was really pushing clock speed while POWER2, PA-RISC, and the R8000 showed impressive numbers at much lower clocks.

7 months agoby kev009

> The R8000 is not a CPU in the traditional sense. It is a processor, but that processor is comprised of many individual chips

And retrocomputing geeks (and just any geek sufficiently old) got rueful grins on their faces.

This is traditional, in the sense of being old-fashioned. CPUs were built out of discrete components back when that meant individual vacuum tubes, discrete solid-state components, and then, finally, discrete chips. Thousands of individual SSI chips in computers like the Apollo Guidance Computer. Even after the first single-chip CPU was developed, larger computers still used multi-chip CPUs, like the PDP-11 architecture being implemented on four chips in the LSI-11 chipset.

https://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11_chip_set

That's before some people were born, I guess, so we have this.

7 months agoby msla

SGI dominated the workstation graphic market back in the day.

Steve Jobs wanted NeXT to essentially be SGI.

I have a soft spot for the Octane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane

The G4 cube, was Apple version of it whe when Jobs returned to Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube

7 months agoby alberth

I had a Teal Indigo2 for a few years about 15 years ago. I loved it! It had the cool feet that let you prop it up sideways so you could have it in tower mode. The feet had these little scoops embedded in them so the machine could more effectively hoover up all the dust from the floor. Fantastic!

7 months agoby Kimitri

I’d love an old UNIX machine like this or one of the later Solaris SPARC desktop towers. Beautiful machines running now rare software.

How does the documentation for the software development environment for this machine stack up today?

7 months agoby Tsiklon

Oh, cool!

I used a purple Indigo 2 as my desktop for a few years.

When there were some issues with the local hot and cold running power for a few weeks, sometimes I'd get home to my study after being out and about and see 'brownout detected' on my console xterm.

That was my cue to add "coax the x86 kit in the rack back to life" to my task list once I'd had a coffee and settled in.

(later it got rehomed to DrHyde's place in London where it served honourably as a CPAN testers machine until finally passing away of old age)

7 months agoby mst

TIL Windows 3.1 was running on MIPS

7 months agoby madduci

> I bought a sled, so now IRIX is installed on a real 4GB SCSI Quantum Fireball HDD ... whilst it lasts, anyway.

Yeah, I think the disks are the crux of the matter. Afaik, SCSI disks (those with a parallel interface) haven't been made in decades (those with FC interface are still made, I think). IDE drives, OTOH, can trivially be replaced (upgraded) with CF cards. Is there a SCSI to IDE (oh the horror) adapter?

And me disposing of an Sun Ultra 60 because it (was ancient and) came with the inferior IDE interface ...

7 months agoby guenthert

So. Many. Chips!

7 months agoby justinator