The SGI Buyer's Guide (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The SGI Buyer's Guide (2003)

hardware.majix.org

47 pointsuticus28 comments

When I was a teenager my dad brought me to the 7th floor of the Daily News building in Philly. This floor was a kind of skunk labs - tasked with digitizing the paper for their new “website.”

This experience brought a couple of firsts:

My first time using the internet on a screaming fast, dedicated T1 line. Unbelievable to see Netscape load a site so quickly.

And: my first time seeing an SGI Indy. A row of them, in fact. This set off a fascination with operating systems outside System 7. I was so excited to get my hands on MkLinux, BeOS and later Rhapsody/OS X developer preview.

I remember watching a space shuttle launch live on the MBONE (multicast backbone) on one of the Indigo2 machines in the mech eng CAD lab. At the time the Australian internet uplink to the US terminated in the basement of that building. It took so long for home internet to catch up with that experience.

And yeah, burnt a bunch of time on MkLinux and NetBSD on 64030 trying to achieve home Unix.

Hadn't really heard of SGI too much, going down the rabbit hole I thought this snippet from the Wikipedia page was especially interesting

"For eight consecutive years (1995–2002), all films nominated for an Academy Award for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects were created on Silicon Graphics computer systems"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Entertainment...

it is a little known fact that there was a version of Photoshop made for SGI's Irix.

The Windows emulator is pretty fun too ..

It was ported from the Mac version, along with Illustrator, using a set of libraries called Lattitude that implimented the Mac toolbox on Unix systems.

http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...

Although it is stupid I can't stop searching Ebay for SGI machines. I have fond memories of running an Indy on my desktop and operating some Onyx machines. Now they are overpriced and it really doesn't make much sense to own one, apart from maybe the latest Origin 2 with R12000 but even this in the end would only catch dust. Even the best Buttonfly demos on the latest and greatest machines get a bit tired after a while.

Once upon a time this stuff was so cheap, a little later than the (2003), because IRIX was discontinued and nobody knew what to do with all of the surplus. Something like a Tezro was always a little pricey and filled a permanent niche, but I got tons of Origin 300s and stuff like that without thinking much about it at the time. I've got the Router rack and several IR3/IR4 bricks.

LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration.

> LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration.

Doesn't that kind of completely miss the entire point of the hobby? Like attending an online language class in your spare time and then just using deepl in a separate tab?

Depends what you are trying to do and what is fun to you. Artisanal assembly on an 8-bitter can be therapeutic. I'm quite happy to let Claude rip through radare2 and ghidra de-compilations without understanding the intermediate steps.

There are plenty of great things to run on old SGI hardware that are still quite fun - Tranquility, Mekton, all the 3D apps you can find, flightsim, etc.

Old home computers are still fun because there are hundreds or thousands of games and scene demos, and active enthusiast audiences for creative output.

SGI machines are extremely cool, but I don't quite grasp if collectors of old UNIX workstation use their machines regularly, and if so, what for.

Still, if I had the cash and desk space, I wouldn't mind a souped-up Indy that I could play around with for half an our once a year.

I got an Indigo² when I was 16, so 1998, and it was my desktop through college. In 2009 I bought an O2, absolutely maxed it out (including the 600MHz RM7000 mod), and ran it next to my main work computer at the office until I left that company in 2018. I used it mainly for screensavers, IRC, xmms, and shelling out, although I did (ineffectually) mine Litecoin on it for a couple weeks back when that was a thing. I reckon it could still do all of that for me today. At one point it had racked up 4 uninterrupted years of uptime! Then they did power maintenance at the office and messed that up for me :(

An Indigo² would have been a pretty decent machine in 1998 though? As in, running current versions of application software and capable of keeping up with normal surfing, programming workloads, etc. A friend of mine still used a beefy Indy for that kind of stuff in 1999 IIRC.

I can see how an O2 can be a fun second machine at work however, as a conversation starter and mood lifter!

It's just that when I see someone running an SGI or equivalent these days, it's mostly Buttonfly or something to that effect. Maybe they're even running NetBSD, which seems even more pointless, since it gives the same exact experience you can have with any dirt cheap old PC. Is anyone still using them for, say, personal video editing or home project CAD drawings just for the heck of it? Or maybe solving Advent of Code?

I toyed a bit with a NeXT cube a while back. It was fun to tick that box on the workstation bingo sheet, but the excitement wore off rather fast; running an old version of Mathematica very slowly isn't my personal idea of fun. Similarly, I tried a pair of SGI/CrystalEyes stereoscopic glasses together with an Indigo a while back, which felt like a fun novelty trinket and held my attention for about as long.

I'm glad there are enthusiasts around who care for these machines and keep them around for posterity, because I think they have great historical significance. I guess I'm just not into that particular flavor of retro computing.

Back in the day... reputable.com was the site for SGI reselling.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010404030102/http://www.reputa...

Some of its last prices... https://web.archive.org/web/20071016215954/http://www.reputa...

I used to dream of owning an O2, in no small part due to it being the host of Erwin from UserFriendly. And then I managed to score multiple out of the trash years later in college, funny how the world works. :)

I wish SGI would return and make a laptop.

Like the Indy laptop in the "Congo" movie ? :)

Wasn’t it “Twister” (1996) that had a (fake) SGI laptop?

EDIT: Or was it “Sneakers” (1992)?

Actually it was both "Congo" and "Twister": https://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.php?f=30

I've got a beefy Octane (4GB of RAM! dual R12000! MXE graphics!) but I honestly don't do much... At a time I used it as an X11 terminal but it's a bit too hot and loud even for that :)

Tranquility, Mekton, ElectroGig:3DGO, Maya, Lightwave .. so many fun toys to play with on Octane if you've got the gumption ..

My favourite game back then was "Certain Impact", but AFAIK it only runs on IRIX 5.3 (probably uses COFF binaries?), on Indigo2 High Impact with TRAM or Extreme Impact with TRAM.

Ooh yes, that is a great arcade-style flight sim, if I remember correctly. Worth keeping a machine around just for that! ;)

(2003)

I started checking after it said "these systems are six years old". Yeah, it's been a bit longer than that...

I am old enough to have ben in business when SGI were a thing. The one thing I remember is that with the UMA arch, the memory was at the center of the design, not the CPU.

Not unlike Apple Silicon...

They definitely also had NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access): on multi-CPU systems, you had a variety of ways to specify where you wanted your data to live (stay close to one CPU, for example).

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