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 :)
@@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.
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.
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 . . .
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.
I was in film school in the mid-90's and took a 3D modeling class and we used this exact machine, except that ours "only" had 32MB of RAM. That was at a time when most home computers had 4MB, though, so I still thought it was crazy - it'd be like a machine today having 256GB of RAM. We ran Alias for 3D modeling, which is the same software used to make those movies you mentioned. It took about 10 minutes to render a single simple frame (not anything complex or realistic like in those movies), but the results were pretty spectacular in the end. I've always wanted my own Indigo2 ever since then - congrats on getting one yourself. Irix at the time was definitely light years beyond any home GUI-based OS - I felt like I was seeing the future (and in many ways I was).
Yeah... I can't tell you how many product releases I've seen from various companies where I've been like "yeah, we had that in IRIX 20 years ago" or some such. It's really a pity that the company didn't survive longer... who knows what else could have come out of that place. Definitely the best place I've ever worked.
@@PhilDietz at one job in '96, some of the SGIs I used had 4 GB of RAM. They were the Onyxes with the Infinite Reality engine GPU, 16 CPUs, and 266 GB of RAID storage. Not impressive today, but again, this was 1996.
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.
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.
@@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.)
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.
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.
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.
@@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
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.
I remember these in the mid 90's that were always used by the early CGI film industry companies, Animal Logic comes to mind. They were deadly expensive to purchase. Then what was wild was how quickly they were wiped out and these incredible computers were seen as junk. Some units ended up in museums as a reminder to their amazing ability a long time ago.
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.
and that's why nothing compares to the 90s. A decade of beau😍tiful people and minds. Thank you for allowing me to follow them and live like I will never live again😢
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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.
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.
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 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.
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
@@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.
@@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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great video! I had the opportunity to use Indigo workstations at my job. They were in service all the way until 2019! There is nothing more unique than that boot up sound.
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.
Woah I wanted to buy that exact sgi I was literally looking at the ad a while back, so glad you got it. I somehow had one when I was like 9 years old and no idea what happened to it.
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 :-)
I had the sun gdm for a bit (very much regret selling it) and I was able to use my regular gaming laptop with it using DisplayPort to vga adapter. I couldn’t use the full 2k resolution but I didn’t really want to, mostly because I wanted the higher refresh rates for gaming. Playing halo infinite and Elden Ring on that monitor was amazing. These “HD” CRTs at regular viewing look as if they’re printing the image and the phosphors (or pixels for a modern LCD display) are imperceptible, making one of the smoothest images and motions on a screen
@@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. :)
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!
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
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.
3:10 - Elan is actually the middle of the pre-IMPACT stack, it's exactly half of an Extreme, the latter having twice the raster engines and twice the geometry engines (Extreme's 8 GEs giving 256 MFLOPs total). The Indigo2 Technical Report on my site has full details. Elan has 4 GEs and 1 RE. Below Elan is XZ (confusingly named) which has the same single raster engine but only 2 GEs. Here's a strange thing, by Feb 1996 the R4K/250 Indigo2 with SolidIMPACT was actually cheaper than the same config with Extreme, even though Solid was 2x faster and only used a single slot. SGI had some pretty weird pricing structures, though back then RAM was often the larger pricing component (a single 128MB kit was about 10K). Infact, at that time an Indigo2 with Extreme was priced exactly the same as XZ, though one can't tell from the price lists whether XZ referred to the half-Elan SKU or to Elan in terms of GE count. In Indy, XZ is the same as Elan in Indigo2 (4 GEs and 1 RE), while in IRIS Indigo it's also referred to as Elan, with again the 2GE version detected as XZ instead. SGI's technical and marketing names sometimes didn't align very well. 7:00 - Yikes, 5.3 is pretty old. Drop me a line if you'd like a disk with a full 6.2 or 6.5.22 install, happy to help out (just search for "SGI Ian", send an email to my Yahoo address). Note it was I who supplied the Indigo2 reviewed by LGR, likewise the Indigo2 and O2 parts sets reviewed by Gamers Nexus.
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.
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!
I've got the T'shirt for the Indigo, "Indy Cam". I travelled on the SGI Magic Bus (tour buss loaded with hardware) selling the graphics programs you show. I was wearing my Parrallax Software (Jurassic Park) T yesterday and Indy shirt a few days before that. I sold them with WaveFront, Parallax, Xaos Tools, ... disc arrays for real time compositing,... Also worked for Symbolics which was even more amazing.
The coolness factor of this machine is just over the top, especially considering it still works, and works well! Just the fact that you have that 'file system' interface from Jurassic Park makes it all that much better! The GUI layout looks very similar to what I have/had on a 2003 HP J6750 graphics workstation. It ran HP-UX 11.11i and used CDE (Common Desktop Environment) for the GUI. It was a bit limited, since I really didn't have any of the graphics packages for it, just the basic install of HP-UX and the CDE GUI. Later on, I switched it, and a J6000 workstation, and a RP2470/A500 server, over to Debian PA-RISC Linux, although it wasn't until just last year that I got the J6750 to actually run a Gnome GUI desktop.😉
I actually managed to score an R10000 IMPACT model off eBay in the summer of 2000, and ended up using it as my main desktop for a year or two. That time was a sweet spot, when these sorts of computers were old enough to be affordable on the used market, but new enough to still actually be useful as general machines. Went kinda overboard with my UNIX workstation explorations back then.
This machine (or another SGI machine) was behind the making of my favorite arcade game, Killer Instinct! I remember being blown away by the graphics in that game when I first saw it.
Thanks for this cool video ! In 1989-1996 I was using Amiga Computers A500 to big expensive A4000, it's was best computers graphics machine but not powerfull for 3D and i never know the Silicon Graphics at this time. Now i learn what i forget in the 90's... Hello from France ! Bye.
Very cool. In my apprenticeship i got the task to remove all Hard drives from Old used PCs so they could be sold. There where also SGI Indigo 2s and SGI Octanes there. Also some SUN Ultra 2x machines. I really found them interesting, but sadly i had no monitor to connect to it. I wanted to play with that thing. I think later i found i the pile a corresponding monitor so i could boot up the Indigo 2 and wanted to play with it. but not much luck it was password locked. When i remember correctly. And i still had a task to do so not too much time to fumble around with that. :D So Thank you for that video. :)
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). :)
I went to a demo day at SGI Reading U.K. in about 198? And was blown away. I had the Indigo2 as my workstation. Great machine way ahead of its day. The other awsome machine was the Digital TruUnix 64 laptop. If you saw it today you would swear it’s a MacBook.
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.
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.
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.
Back in the day I had these installed in our ad agency in Soho, London. The year after Jurassic Park came out. We were the first ad agency to have this kind of high end graphical capability in-house. It revolutionised our workflow and we made a ton of money. Life was simpler then! 😏
Too early in the video to know if any of the other Nekochan folks have checked in, but I, misterdna (name chose for Hammond's DNA character in JP and Devo's "Smart Patrol"), owned an Indigo2 MaxImpact wtih 1GB RAM. The weird thing was you had to be careful about heat. My RAM modules were 128MB each, but they were double-decker SIMMs with flat-flex ribbons connecting the two halves. Absolutely insane amount of RAM, as mentioned, but still specialized even in 2005 when I bought my system. I never did get the TRAMs for my Max Impact graphics board set, but I managed to find a 100mbit Ethernet card in EISA form. I shifted my attention to my trash-find Octane2 before I could get that card working, though. -- edited for fat-keying.
Neko checkin achieved! :D Worth noting btw SGI never officially supported 1GB when R10K Indigo2 was current, the official max was 640MB. It may well have been a heat issue, though I suppose by the time denser SIMMs came along (such as the common HP SKU), or indeed those with single-sided ICs, SGI had already moved onto Octane. Annoyingly, I never had a version of the product guide which covered R10K, mine only mentions R4K and R8K.
Had an Impact for a little while in the late 90's as well as an O2 when my college I graduated from got rid of the SGI lab. Pretty cool stuff! Love the way the O2 came apart. Moved a bunch of times and eventually they went to the heap. Kinda wish I still had the O2.
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.
To modern hardware? Probably not great. But, it was ... at least a few years before a typical desktop PC could catch up to this in various ways (and on the software side, I'd argue that in some ways, nothing has yet).
Used exactly this model as a postdoc researcher for biophysical molecular modelling! There was no other system that came near it. I used to play Doom on it quite a lot too!
Back in '96-98, I worked in facilities engineering dept at NASA Langley Research Center in VA. I was doing the engineering drawings using ProEngineer on SGI octains and Indigo 2's. Fun times.
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.
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 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. 😁😁
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...
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
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
@@satokotsuwe 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 🤗
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.
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 . . .
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 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?
@@notaplasticexistence We were doing Auroral and spacial physics!
@@tcpnetworks Yeah physics okay. Antigravity maybe.
@@notaplasticexistence We were spying though.... On particles... :)
@@tcpnetworks I crave forbidden knowledge
I was in film school in the mid-90's and took a 3D modeling class and we used this exact machine, except that ours "only" had 32MB of RAM. That was at a time when most home computers had 4MB, though, so I still thought it was crazy - it'd be like a machine today having 256GB of RAM. We ran Alias for 3D modeling, which is the same software used to make those movies you mentioned. It took about 10 minutes to render a single simple frame (not anything complex or realistic like in those movies), but the results were pretty spectacular in the end. I've always wanted my own Indigo2 ever since then - congrats on getting one yourself. Irix at the time was definitely light years beyond any home GUI-based OS - I felt like I was seeing the future (and in many ways I was).
Yeah... I can't tell you how many product releases I've seen from various companies where I've been like "yeah, we had that in IRIX 20 years ago" or some such. It's really a pity that the company didn't survive longer... who knows what else could have come out of that place. Definitely the best place I've ever worked.
Pretty sure the one I bought new (and still have) in 1996 had 256 MB RAM.
I was also in film school in the mid-90s and worked at VFX companies using these SGIs.
@@PhilDietz at one job in '96, some of the SGIs I used had 4 GB of RAM. They were the Onyxes with the Infinite Reality engine GPU, 16 CPUs, and 266 GB of RAID storage.
Not impressive today, but again, this was 1996.
@@samgod for 1996 that could have done some serious finite element simulations.
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.
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.
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.)
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?? :)
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
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.
I remember these in the mid 90's that were always used by the early CGI film industry companies, Animal Logic comes to mind. They were deadly expensive to purchase. Then what was wild was how quickly they were wiped out and these incredible computers were seen as junk. Some units ended up in museums as a reminder to their amazing ability a long time ago.
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.
and that's why nothing compares to the 90s. A decade of beau😍tiful people and minds. Thank you for allowing me to follow them and live like I will never live again😢
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.
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
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 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.
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 :).
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 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.
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. :)
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 had a rough day and this video makes me happy. Thanks for putting it out there!
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.
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.
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 used to work on Sun Sparcstations in the 90s and I was drooling at the idea of using one of these beasts!
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.
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.
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.
glad to see more people talk about retro stuff like this
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.
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.
Ah terrific! Yes I used SGI machines and also Sun Sparc. Good times 1989 to about 2007
That was awesome all around. Love the jurassic park connections.
Great video! I had the opportunity to use Indigo workstations at my job. They were in service all the way until 2019! There is nothing more unique than that boot up sound.
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.
9:54 pure v a p o r w a v e vibe right there!
Woah I wanted to buy that exact sgi I was literally looking at the ad a while back, so glad you got it. I somehow had one when I was like 9 years old and no idea what happened to it.
I had one of these on my desk back when it came out. Thanks for the video, to remind me of the old days :)
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 :-)
I had the sun gdm for a bit (very much regret selling it) and I was able to use my regular gaming laptop with it using DisplayPort to vga adapter. I couldn’t use the full 2k resolution but I didn’t really want to, mostly because I wanted the higher refresh rates for gaming. Playing halo infinite and Elden Ring on that monitor was amazing. These “HD” CRTs at regular viewing look as if they’re printing the image and the phosphors (or pixels for a modern LCD display) are imperceptible, making one of the smoothest images and motions on a screen
Thank you SO much for sharing this story. Brings back a lot of good memories
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.
yippee my favorite niche computer youtuber grahh
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. :)
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!
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
6:18 i felt that anticipation during boot XD
Thats the video I waited for since I saw the making of Jurassic Park as a kid
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.
3:10 - Elan is actually the middle of the pre-IMPACT stack, it's exactly half of an Extreme, the latter having twice the raster engines and twice the geometry engines (Extreme's 8 GEs giving 256 MFLOPs total). The Indigo2 Technical Report on my site has full details. Elan has 4 GEs and 1 RE. Below Elan is XZ (confusingly named) which has the same single raster engine but only 2 GEs.
Here's a strange thing, by Feb 1996 the R4K/250 Indigo2 with SolidIMPACT was actually cheaper than the same config with Extreme, even though Solid was 2x faster and only used a single slot. SGI had some pretty weird pricing structures, though back then RAM was often the larger pricing component (a single 128MB kit was about 10K).
Infact, at that time an Indigo2 with Extreme was priced exactly the same as XZ, though one can't tell from the price lists whether XZ referred to the half-Elan SKU or to Elan in terms of GE count. In Indy, XZ is the same as Elan in Indigo2 (4 GEs and 1 RE), while in IRIS Indigo it's also referred to as Elan, with again the 2GE version detected as XZ instead. SGI's technical and marketing names sometimes didn't align very well.
7:00 - Yikes, 5.3 is pretty old. Drop me a line if you'd like a disk with a full 6.2 or 6.5.22 install, happy to help out (just search for "SGI Ian", send an email to my Yahoo address).
Note it was I who supplied the Indigo2 reviewed by LGR, likewise the Indigo2 and O2 parts sets reviewed by Gamers Nexus.
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!
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.
One of the most aesthetic computers ever made
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!
I've got the T'shirt for the Indigo, "Indy Cam". I travelled on the SGI Magic Bus (tour buss loaded with hardware) selling the graphics programs you show. I was wearing my Parrallax Software (Jurassic Park) T yesterday and Indy shirt a few days before that. I sold them with WaveFront, Parallax, Xaos Tools, ... disc arrays for real time compositing,... Also worked for Symbolics which was even more amazing.
The coolness factor of this machine is just over the top, especially considering it still works, and works well! Just the fact that you have that 'file system' interface from Jurassic Park makes it all that much better! The GUI layout looks very similar to what I have/had on a 2003 HP J6750 graphics workstation. It ran HP-UX 11.11i and used CDE (Common Desktop Environment) for the GUI. It was a bit limited, since I really didn't have any of the graphics packages for it, just the basic install of HP-UX and the CDE GUI. Later on, I switched it, and a J6000 workstation, and a RP2470/A500 server, over to Debian PA-RISC Linux, although it wasn't until just last year that I got the J6750 to actually run a Gnome GUI desktop.😉
i remember how much fun my friend and I had playing w/this when first came out.
Got to use these (or something under the same line) in college. I had no idea what they cost.
REALLY cool score dude. You own an amazing artifact.
i had both of those at work...running CAM software back in the day....they were awesome.
Worked on one of these for about a year. very cool machine - insane at the time.
I actually managed to score an R10000 IMPACT model off eBay in the summer of 2000, and ended up using it as my main desktop for a year or two. That time was a sweet spot, when these sorts of computers were old enough to be affordable on the used market, but new enough to still actually be useful as general machines. Went kinda overboard with my UNIX workstation explorations back then.
This machine (or another SGI machine) was behind the making of my favorite arcade game, Killer Instinct! I remember being blown away by the graphics in that game when I first saw it.
Thanks for this cool video ! In 1989-1996 I was using Amiga Computers A500 to big expensive A4000, it's was best computers graphics machine but not powerfull for 3D and i never know the Silicon Graphics at this time. Now i learn what i forget in the 90's... Hello from France ! Bye.
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
Very cool.
In my apprenticeship i got the task to remove all Hard drives from Old used PCs so they could be sold.
There where also SGI Indigo 2s and SGI Octanes there. Also some SUN Ultra 2x machines.
I really found them interesting, but sadly i had no monitor to connect to it. I wanted to play with that thing.
I think later i found i the pile a corresponding monitor so i could boot up the Indigo 2 and wanted to play with it. but not much luck it was password locked. When i remember correctly.
And i still had a task to do so not too much time to fumble around with that. :D
So Thank you for that video. :)
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). :)
I went to a demo day at SGI Reading U.K. in about 198? And was blown away. I had the Indigo2 as my workstation. Great machine way ahead of its day. The other awsome machine was the Digital TruUnix 64 laptop. If you saw it today you would swear it’s a MacBook.
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.
The music is a bop in this vid. Good shi my fren🔥
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.
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.
It's amazing how powerful our stuff is now - How much we take for granted!
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.
Pretty cool to see. Thanks for the video =D
Back in the day I had these installed in our ad agency in Soho, London. The year after Jurassic Park came out. We were the first ad agency to have this kind of high end graphical capability in-house. It revolutionised our workflow and we made a ton of money. Life was simpler then! 😏
this is sick another great video SGI INDIGO LESSS GOOOOOO
Too early in the video to know if any of the other Nekochan folks have checked in, but I, misterdna (name chose for Hammond's DNA character in JP and Devo's "Smart Patrol"), owned an Indigo2 MaxImpact wtih 1GB RAM. The weird thing was you had to be careful about heat. My RAM modules were 128MB each, but they were double-decker SIMMs with flat-flex ribbons connecting the two halves. Absolutely insane amount of RAM, as mentioned, but still specialized even in 2005 when I bought my system. I never did get the TRAMs for my Max Impact graphics board set, but I managed to find a 100mbit Ethernet card in EISA form. I shifted my attention to my trash-find Octane2 before I could get that card working, though. -- edited for fat-keying.
Neko checkin achieved! :D Worth noting btw SGI never officially supported 1GB when R10K Indigo2 was current, the official max was 640MB. It may well have been a heat issue, though I suppose by the time denser SIMMs came along (such as the common HP SKU), or indeed those with single-sided ICs, SGI had already moved onto Octane. Annoyingly, I never had a version of the product guide which covered R10K, mine only mentions R4K and R8K.
The OSSC would have also converted the SOG signal via the VGA port, at which point you could output via DVI or HDMI back to VGA
Had an Impact for a little while in the late 90's as well as an O2 when my college I graduated from got rid of the SGI lab. Pretty cool stuff! Love the way the O2 came apart. Moved a bunch of times and eventually they went to the heap. Kinda wish I still had the O2.
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.
Is it possible the red one is just the purple one with faded or poor colour grading?
Someone said it was a prototype for the later version.
I attended a film school in 1998-1999, and I remember we had some of the red Indigo 2s in our lab.
Loved this machine at the time!
Oh... I remember working on those in university. Amazing computers!
How does this hardware compare in specs to modern hardware? It's amazing how much these go for today.
To modern hardware? Probably not great. But, it was ... at least a few years before a typical desktop PC could catch up to this in various ways (and on the software side, I'd argue that in some ways, nothing has yet).
Used exactly this model as a postdoc researcher for biophysical molecular modelling! There was no other system that came near it. I used to play Doom on it quite a lot too!
this brings back memories... i worked on this and the onyx.
Back in '96-98, I worked in facilities engineering dept at NASA Langley Research Center in VA. I was doing the engineering drawings using ProEngineer on SGI octains and Indigo 2's. Fun times.
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.
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 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. 😁😁
i have literally no use for one, but I've always wanted an SGI machine!
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...
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