VCF Southwest 2026, but Edited on Silicon Graphics for '90s TV [video] | Hacker News Reader

VCF Southwest 2026, but Edited on Silicon Graphics for '90s TV [video]

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73 pointszdw15 comments

The nVME kernel module and stack of adapters to go from PCI -> PCIe -> m2 was one of the most impressive hacks in this video.

It's kinda amazing how many older OS's are getting drivers and patches for newer hardware - Windows 98 and NT got newer USB revisions and nVME in the last few years as well.

Consider me weird, but I really find that old-school CDE interface really appealing, visually.

I don’t want my desktop to work like CDE (ie OpenCDE), but just look like it.

Now if someone could create a Hyprland template for that, that would be awesome.

It definitely took me back when the presenter came within half a pixel of logging out instead of opening the application. That's why they made the O2 small enough to throw across the room.

That was Motif but not CDE. Maybe you were making a statement not directly about the video, I'm not certain. Irix called it the Irix Interactive Desktop.

I did like it. I still do, visually. I don't think I would want to go back to it full time.

> That was Motif but not CDE.

Indeed it's not CDE (although GP could just be saying that he liked old school WM / UIs like CDE, not necessarily that the one in TFV was CDE) but I think technically in the vid it's even SGI's 4Dwm. Heavily based on Motif but not totally visually identical to Motif? According to Wikipedia 4Dwm began in 1991.

As a sidenote a friend back then was lucky enough to have a SGI at home (for his stepfather was at the head of SGI Benelux) and that 4Dwm environment always struck me as particularly slick.

Picture+Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX_Interactive_Desktop

Fun fact: Irix 5.3 in Nov 1994 was the first desktop OS to allow web URLs to be desktop shortcuts, pre-Windows95+MacOS similar capability. SGI licensed Netscape Mosaic so they could do that.

When I first switched from IRIX to Linux I missed the SGI desktop, and was running a clone. I think it was this one - looks like it is still around:

http://5dwm.org/sgi-schemes.html

The video editing software in the video is SGO Jaleo. I've read about its existence, but I don't think I've ever been able to find a demo of someone using it before, so that was really cool to see. With regard to how the video was captured, there was a Firewire card option for the O2. I believe a number of cheap cards were compatible with the official one. I suspect it would have made capturing harder, not easier, given that they had a VTR with SDI output though.

There was an official 1394 card for the O2 that only supported DV (not the usual block device protocols).

SGI was super weird with 1394... the Origin 3400 I-brick had a 1394 port that it used for its internal CD-ROM via a 1394-to-IDE adapter, which is freak show stuff.

>via a 1394-to-IDE adapter, which is freak show stuff.

Wow...do you have pics? I used to have quite a collection of adapters of dubious utility...

These days of course you capture off your DV and HDV cameras with a cheapy PCIe firewire card, dvgrab, and ffmpeg ;-)

Something that I appreciated was that when you had a setup for a particular task, all of the knobs and controls were in service of that task (for the most part). So you could put together a video editing station (which an acquaintance of mine did) but the extravagance was that it was this expensive gear that really did one thing well. While today you could put together a Raspberry Pi 5 setup to do video editing with all the knobs and controls of the switchers and editors back in the day, and it would be very affordable and just as functional.

I have an SGI O2 sitting in my closet. Unfortunately, I gutted the case with the idea of inserting a micro-PC, but I kept all the parts and hope to restore it to original state some day.

Anyone here lucky enough to have an SGI workstation as their daily driver in the 90's?

I had an Indigo2 Extreme as my main workstation during one of my student jobs in college around 1997. By that point, that particular model wasn't really the hot thing, and I didn't do a lot of graphics work, but it was still fun to have.

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