SGI Indigo2: An $86,000 Workstation from 1995
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ม.ค. 2017
- Diving into the Silicon Graphics Indigo² desktop workstation computer! This was a beast in 1995, and yes, "it's a UNIX system, I know this!" How do the pros and cons stack up, what games can you play on it, and is it worth the cost today?
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● Music used in order of appearance:
"Tuned In 2," "Dress Code Black 1," "On My Mind 1," "Peek A Boo"
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The fact that nobody here seems to mention is that this thing was capable of Standard High Definition a full decade before that went mainstream. Holy moly.
Even crazier is that about the same time VHS tape had been modified to record and playback "Full HD." Unfortunately it was too expensive for most people. Just like this machine. Lol. Seriously though late 90s and early 2000s CRTs had no problem with resolution. Source material was the problem. Only way we could actually see HD video on them for the most part was while gaming.
Not worth 30k but yeah sounds crazy
The "Picasso II" video card for the Amiga 3000 came pretty close, for a tenth of the price, 1600×1280, SVGA, FBAS and S-VHS outputs, (S-VHS PAL only though)
@@greggoog7559 12 bit doesn't imply HDR, although it is preferable for it.
Long before the HDR that we know today, cineon was a thing and the main way to deal with high dynamic range material, i.e film.
It was a10 bit workflow.
Circa 2000 17-19" most "Flatrons" and "Trinitrons" on the market were 1280x1024 screens, with bigger CRTs going for 1600x1200 or similar and top one going up to 2560×1920. This were pretty expensive, for sure, mostly for DTP, 3D etc, but even midrange models back then could display nice clear image with muuuch greater refresh rate than what we have now (60Hz). Not to mention colour reproduction, input lag and so on. There's no point comparing LCD to CRTs anyway. CRTs rocks in every aspect (except size/power consumption) compared to LCD.
My dad worked for them in the 90's and I remember as a teenager being blown away by their headquarters in Mountain View (which is now Google's headquarters) they had theaters, kitchenettes everywhere with free food, a lap pool and people would bring their pets to work. I feel like the 90's was the golden age of Silicon Valley.
It was, it really was.
Yes I too was there and I remember those exciting times.
They have all that and more nowadays though, minus the pets for obvious reasons.
*90's was the golden age
everything is trash nowadays
And here I am, amazed in 2021 because my new job is pet friendly and has a hammock, also I work from home whenever I want... Welcome to Brazil fellas... hahahaha
I spent nearly a decade producing animation on SGI boxes and to this day I have never found another OS that was as smooth and capable as IRIX. I miss it.
Yes it was purpose built, but its cheaper now you can do amazing stuff on the cheapest laptop, so you don't need to be a million air. This means anyone can do what ever they want now.
I worked with irix once, they had maya 1.5 on the machine and it rendered faster than Final Cut Pro on their power macs.
yeah me too, but for VFX. with Tezro and Octane for Autodesk Flame
@@bjtaudio while technically true, have you ever compared the render times?
@@bjtaudio Maybe for some single car model. But not entire high poly scenes. I got scenes that require at least 64GB of ram to open and work.
That was my workstation at one of my jobs. It was incredible, almost magical. It ran an IRIX version of AutoCAD.
What do You do for living?
@@pedrooscarbh I was a mechanical engineer in the aerospace/jet engine field.
Funny i can do all the things this did on my $2000 laptop
Would've been a nice cherry ontop for your severance package heh
No you didn't 👌
I got a tour of NASA's ground control center recently, and they have a bunch of Silicon Graphics Indigo Iris systems still in use! I guess it's a case of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.
Its all about their mission.
Those computers have most likely all been running 24/7 since new as well
Hapa Nice Day Don’t get weird in here, man.
its how they draw the fake planets
MrCalverino Gotta have some way to make round things look flat, amirite?
When you mentioned 1 gig of RAM in 1995, I was like. Holy shit!!
Ikr, my only '95 computer maxed out at 68MB, and forget graphics ram.
I remember buying 4 MB for $100 in 1995.
Yup! I upgraded from 4MB to 8MB in 1995 and it cost me around that. xD
コンピューティング A E S T H E T I C What's odd is, It's acculy useable today even if you used windows 10, Obviously it's not much at all but still.
in 1995, i had 4mb or ram.....enough to play doom :'(
Used to use this for my PhD in theoretical physics at MIT. In 1994 it seemed like a godsend machine however after about a year or two it started to become obsolete in the realm of theoretical physics making us move to the most current ibm machine.
good old Moore's Law
Did you later take a job at Black Mesa?
@@tinman3586 JM doesn't need to hear all this, he's a highly trained proffesionalist."
I used one of these as a high schooler doing an internship at a university in 1995. I was shown the early Internet with it, but it was mind blowing to access such a powerful computer. Their setup cost AU$200,000 at the time. It was like getting to play with a McLaren F1.
Thank you for adding the values in the metric system as well.
Agreed!
Disagreed! Imperial Unit Master Race for life
Sure thing! Over half of my views come from outside the USA, so it only makes sense.
Back in the day, around 1995 , I worked at Bungie software. We used an indigo for much of our character creation and animation stuff for the Myth series. I hated unix shell but loved the machines capabilities and render features. We moved up to the 02 machines and then bumped them entirely for dec alphas. Wow so much money went poof!! Lol
I loved Myth, thanks.
Frank Pusateri: I have a question for you. Is it true Bungie only stopped making FPS because Jason Jones didn't want to anymore? Or was there other reasons for it?
Not counting Halo, because Halo became a FPS.
eupher2 he didn't want to stop as much diversify the output of the company. He and the rest of us had many ideas that went out of the scope of the fps genre.
Haven't thought about myth in years... Loved that game. Thank you.
After working on and with such a gem at the time, how could you ever sit down in front of an Intel based machine again unless it was comparable. If it were me I'd be talking junk about every other machine for the rest on my days. Would be like moving a mountain with a wheelbarrow after you driven a moto grade.
I remember seeing one of these back in 95! It was me and a few friends looking at it.., and when the guy said it had 1gig of RAM.., we were speechless. For those of you not quite old enough to remember..., 1gig of RAM
in 1995 was freakin insane! We laughed because, we didn’t think anyone would believe us about seeing a computer with 1gig of RAM. Plus that hard drive was also incredibly large for 1995!
i had a ti extensa laptop in 1996 w/ 8mb ram and 120mb hard drive sporting a pentium 75. It was about $3200. Yeah, 1 gig of ram would still drive operating systems until windows 10.
You can still get hardware at that level of absurdity these days (it's probably even easier too, if your credit card could clear the charge you could order it online), if you're willing to go through some special workstation manufacturers. IIRC, the best you can ge these days is:
1. dual 64 core processors (AMD EPYC Rome)
2. 4TB RAM (with the right motherboards and 128gb LRDIMMs)
3. at least quad if not octal Quadro cards, or more likely 1-2 Quadros and an assload of Teslas, way more than Windows will ever support
4. PCIe storage so fast (PCIe 4.0 x16 in an add-on card) that literally only Linux can use it to its full potential
and you might wonder, "what ungodly software needs this kind of hardware??" and the answer is, beyond anything you should be doing on server farms like rendering and supercomputing, is usually DaVinci Resolve on Linux for 8K+ editing, color correction, and 2D/3D compositing.
@@romannasuti25 Hell, what if you game on the setup? Will it have high amounts of FPS?
@@bmhater1283 octo quadro should run raytracing max settings on cyberpunk at ~30fps
If someone showed you a computer from nowadays you would think it came out of a UFO
In 1995 I trained using SGI computers and it wasn't just the hardware that was outrageous, it was also the software and support. At the university that I attended, a SGI super computer about the size of a household refrigerator replaced a Cray super computer that took up a huge space in a building designed for it.
Reminds me of my Sun Sparcstation fetish I had back in the early 2000's. I used to put myself through misery to get them up and working as my main desktop computer just because "they were cool." But after a year or two of that, I went back to a regular PC.
I don't blame you there. These kinds of workstations are all kinds of cool, but a bit... obtuse.
I like the interactions between you two
I had a major desire for the Iris Crimson (first 64bit!) and was able to play with one in a creative department. Such amazing machines and SGI is a iconic company long ago.
I have three Crimsons atm, but all have issues, just need a chance with some solid spare time to sort them out. It's probably just a PSU, and I obtained a spare from BAe. Would be fun to get one of them kitted out with an R4K/150 and RE gfx, especially since so far I've had to rely on other people to send me benchmark results for Crimson for my site.
Ian.
The 8-Bit Guy I too had that Sun fetish. Had an IPX all decked out with SCSI devices. Had that networked to an Indigo^2 and HP 9000 735. Got rid off all of it when I got married.
The second you said "Circuit City" I felt all my joints age about 10 years.
I still remember going into the CC and playing a 3do. They had it set up next to a playstation. It seemed cool but was super pricey. Went next door and got a free hotdog from the car dealership, they had a radio station out there livecasting. Fun times.
I remember buying a new gamecube from CC, such an underrated console
Lol I never went there but I would always look at their ads with gaming stuff I would never have as a kid
We used to call it, "Jerk It City"
♫ Welcome to Circuit City, where service is state of the art ♫
Amazed how well this machine was kept. 25 years old and it looks new
To be fair it was pretty unusual to come across one in such good shape, but I also used T-cut which works wonders for any minor marks.
I bought the basic SGI O2 a few months back because I've always wanted to own an SGI ever since I could read (mid to late 90s). Only to learn from my dad a month later that when he was still working in the automotive industry (Chrysler specifically) they used SGI for AutoCAD and had he'd known I wanted one for so long he would have saved me one. I'm talking about the Octane line and a two racks of the servers.
I almost spit my ramen out when you said 150 GB hard-drive in 1995, 150 GB is still usable even today.
Helicopter Down i choked on my coffee when he said “1gb of ram”
150gb is nothing today lmao, there are games that require 150gb.
@@Danuxsy Well, inefficient programming can lead to such games.
@@hexagonist23 how is that related to the size of a game? You can only compress the data so much and most of that size is due to the massive textures and high poly models.
That Harddrive is from 2006-ish tho, it's basicly a Seagate Cheetah 15k.5
I bought two of these things a few months ago from the Royal Navy of all things! Nightmare finding software for it, but I got a copy of Doom for it.
Larry Bundy Jr Put it on the internet!
They're missing a few parts (they were missing the HDDs for obvious reasons), but I certainly wasn't aware they were worth that much, I got 2 Indy's and 2 Indigo 2's for £50, plus another £50 to the bloke who delivered them. the Navy were going to throw them in the skip.
Also got a webcam with mine, same stone grey!
Haha, I bet it runs silky smooth. Keep pressing that + button.
I have an Indigo 2 that's labeled Haliburton Identified (I always think of ol' Cheney when I see that), I'm thinking it was used in the US government somewhere? I don't know how it ended up in the Netherlands though. I have an IndyCam as well, and a lot of other stuff, it's been so long, some of it seems to have become rare. Bummer, I'm not sure if everything works anymore so it can't be fun replacing parts, although the hard drives can be emulated thankfully (it can then be run from a CF card instead) and if anything goes wrong with these, it's usually the hard drives. :)
Larry, I could have helped you with the sw, but never mind. Very good price you got them for though!! 8)
Ian.
I worked shortly with SGI's hardware in the 2000s. For pure performances their stations were way behind high performance PCs. But the quality of their anti aliasing in OpenGL was astonishing. There were not any options to control the oversampling like in nvidia/amd cards but yet the frames were crystal clear. Still impressed by that.
Never have I ever appreciated a Porsche 911 reference as much as this.
My family's first computer in 1998 had 64 MB of ram and a 4GB hard drive. 1 GB of ram and a 120 GB hard drive in 1995 would have been mind blowing.
In 1995, compaq offered 1gb hard drives as a standard option for the first time and 16MB of 72pin EDO ram was high-end.
Look at 1:40 4 GB 11 platers Seagate Barracuda.
15k HDD is available in XXI century, in 1999 space for SCSI is around 36-72 GB.
So disc is upgraded, not original.
86000$ is also mindblowing 😂
I expect the 1GB RAM was added later, while it was still a useful computer but after the RAM wouldn't have cost the 80 grand Clint's figures give. That is, JUST the RAM would be $80K.
Still every geek lusted after SGI's in the day. I once saw one in the wild in a small and amazing looking business, I would have happily touched the hem of root's garment. I revered them as a young guy, and I did Unix in college around the same period, this though on a minicomputer with Wyse serial terminals. The other end of expensive computers! Actually I'd like that mini for all the software me and my friends wrote and played with.
I really coveted SGIs but never used one so I wouldn't have a purpose for it once I'd pressed all the buttons and lorded it over imaginary geeks like it was 1995. Most people couldn't justify it as a fun purchase cos very few people ever used one, or even saw one! Outside high-end graphics work.
@@wojciechkuske242 Yes and CD-ROM is from 4.1999 look at 7.39
1. Buy an old computer and lend it to LGR
2. Wait until he makes a video
3. It goes up in value
4. Sell it
5. $$$$$
elneutrino90 I have an Apricot Portable
elneutrino90 advertise it as used in video by lgr
Stonks
I ran one of these for CAD development and thought it was truly the Rolls Royce of workstations. LOVED IT
I was a purchase manager for a now VERY big video game company back in ‘97. I remember haggling vendors and writing up PO’s for half dozen Indys and a couple of O2s every month. Fun part was after inventory, having the 3D artists show them off. “Yeah why don’t you test it out, load some stuff up and tell me if it’s working good for you.” :)
WAIT, THE JURASSIC PARK FILE MANAGER IS REAL?! WHAAAAAAAAAAAT.
*NIX FTW!!!
What if I told you that the nmap hack from Matrix reloaded is real too?
Yup! They were using this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
I remember when a lot of computer "geeks" made fun of that scene in Jurassic (including me). Goes to show how nerds with only a little bit of knowledge think they know everything xD
Calvin H. They just got lazy and replaced the names
I was in journalism school at Iowa State in the mid-'90s. I took a tech writing course for an English credit. We had a group project for that class; one of my project team members was an engineer. I went to the engineering building to drop off some materials for him, and met him in their CAD lab. It was full of SGI hardware. My jaw dropped when I saw all that high-end gear and what it was all rendering on screen.
Great video, as usual.
what were they rendering?
Engineering... stuff... I was a journalism major.
One professor at my university still uses an sgi workstation for specialized work. He has the SGI CRT and the SGI keyboard to go with it.
Do you know which model he uses? Tell him to beware of the PSU failing, they are getting pretty flakey now, especially Indigo2 and Octane. O2 still runs ok though.
It's great for MIPS programming, especially in regards to the appearance of new MIPS-based chips from China
@@mapesdhs597 It might be an O2 funnily enough. I'm not sure.
@@dimitrilensflareabrams2893 In that case he should be ok. :D And replacement PSUs for O2 are still dirt cheap anyway. O2's longevity problem is tyically more the mbd failing in some manner, or older 32MB memory SIMMs going wrong (tell him to watch out for errors in the SYSLOG that say, "Soft ECC error in the back side of DIMM slot ". The CDROM can also fail, should he be using it (can be repaired though, it's just a small plastic cog which snaps).
@@mapesdhs597 Thank you so much! I have a hunch he'll try to hang onto those machines for quite a long long time. At least until he finds a machine that will work for his purposes.
My uncle was a senior design engineer at SGI in the 90's. I had the pleasure of getting a campus tour from him before I enlisted in the Army. Got to putz around on a Realitymonster (Superlabs 18 for anyone that remembers lol), and get some hate emails for him playing the tank game under his name on the network during lunch. Good times. I remember every time I visited over there, he had a new system (including one of these, I remember specifically) for cases where he wanted to work from home.
Cool! Can you recall what projects he worked on there?
LGR: "You'd have to be a very special unique blend of crazy geek to buy one of these"
Me:
Jochen Lillich You own an Octane? When did you purchase it and for how much?
@@JackFoxtrotEDM one leg and one eye
Nice, I recently picked up an O2
@@JackFoxtrotEDM I have an Octane 2 too, brought 10 years ago for 200 euros and a bottle of jack daniels
SGI Indigo2: HOLD MY BEER
Dude, I bet this thing can run Crysis on minium settings!.
Lol i don't think so
If the Xbox 360 could do it (which had 256mb ram), then this can probably do it to.
idk about that chief. I had a 2.13MHz AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ mobile CPU in my desktop (don't ask), 2GB RAM and a 128MB GeForce FX 5200. It was a fucking slideshow.
Got a 256MB 6200 a couple years later and...it didn't really matter.
@@Taima but with the right optimization, it can probably run Crysis. As shown in the 7th gen consoles.
This really helps ground my understanding of where tech was at the time - I was a kid and marketing material was all we had to guess how things worked. Thank you!
7:58 This menu is pretty much same menu used in Mario 64's file select screen. One my favorite little fun facts I recently learned : )
and you'll never guess what the mips rabbit was named after
@@T3rASys its the sgi's microproc-🤭
7:59 Super Mario 64 Menu :P
exactly
The software was used to develop Super Mario 64. Which is why it looks virtually identical. Mario 64 was developed on a combination of SGI Onyx and SGI INDY workstations. But this is the same OS used in those other machines.
Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire on the Nintendo 64 was developed using multiple SGI Indigo2 dev kits. You could
potentially use it as a very expensive N64 homebrew dev kit and make your own crappy games.
+Adam Demeter I've read that Rare used Onyx workstations. But I wouldn't be surprised if they had some Indigo's as well.
Rare was really one of the first to use SGI workstations as game development software. That was the defining feature of Donkey Kong Country. I could only imagine that they had a big collection of different SGI machines.
I knew I couldn't be the only person to notice that. Hell of a coincidence
$86,000?! sweet jesus and here I thought today's rigs were expensive!
Yeah, but having 1gb of ram in 1995 is almost the equivalent of having 1 TB of ram in a modern computer these days. Just way over the top.
...and don't forget the inflation. :3
$86,000 in 1995 is equivalent to ~$142,000 in 2018
These were not even top of the line. The Silicon Graphics Oynx was $100,000-$250,000
Actually the Oynx and Oynx2 went up to 800,000 in normal spec - I wrote scientific software on the SGI from the beginning of the 90's and used/worked with all of them - including the crappy indy without the go. Then there was the challenge series of main-frames....
Things haven't changed from the money standpoint. A professional graphics computer for content creation (not gaming) costs plenty. Back in early 90's I had almost $10K invested in the Amiga with VideoToaster/Lightwave/GenLock/Time Base Corrector/ etc,etc etc. Was offered 2 SGI's..power to create costs money. Did years ago, dies today.
I used (a predecessor of) one of these at work. They had a pretty impressive multi player flight simulator, which came preinstalled :-)
When Silicon Graphics heard that our company was a potential buyer, they came to Amsterdam with a cool road show in a giant truck showing off these machines. It was worth it, because the company bought more than 50 of them. And yes, it took more than a decade before I saw other workstations with this kind of power.
Ahhhh.... I love the Indigo2. My first workstation when I started in CAE/FEA back in 1998. I still have a backup of that machine on tape somewhere. Got me into collecting them throughout the early 2000's and I ended up with a Power Challenge L Deskside server and eventually a multi CPU Origin 3000 rack. SGI was an amazing company... I wish I had the room to pick up an INdigo2 Impact today...
Awesome! DO you still have the deskside and O3K?
@@mapesdhs597 I wish - damn things pull over a Kilowatt running.. it wasn’t feasible of more than a few hours a week.
This is the kind of videos I love seeing. Computers that weren't available to the general public and are mostly unheard of, but their work is seen everywhere. I'd love to see more videos like this, especially for console dev kits.
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed! Always hoping to get more of this kind of thing to show in the future.
WOW.... so it wasn't a fake program for the movie Jurassic Park!?!? Incredible revelation !
nah ah ah you didn't say the magic word
WOW IT'S AN INTERACTIVE CD-ROM!
"...clever girl..."
Plot twist, you probably even used it yourself at some point. Nintendo used that browser for the file select on Mario 64.
@Amir Abudubai You're thinking of buttonfly
Best workstation I ever used. I loved coming into work early to play on this machine.
And portable too, only needed a small hand truck!
I have a rare Indigo2 Carry Bag (original SGI bag I mean). The funny thing is, it was recommended that it be moved by two people. :D
The pizza box design shown here and also on Sun SPARCstations are my all-time favorite case designs.
Over 20 kilos?! Wow, this thing could concievably have weighed more than the CRT it was hooked up to back in the day. That's one heavy ass computer.
Redhotsmasher no, since the display options were 18 and 20 inch CRTs displaying 1280x1024 or 1600x1200. Back when PCs had 15" at 800x600. Man it was a joy to use one of these "real computers". You want horror, look up how heavy an Octane was. Manual says two-man lift.
Matthew Kriebel People were surprised when I lifted an Octane over my head in my Octane video. It was heavy, certainly heavier than my Indigo2, but not so bad that I couldn't move it or lift it up for the camera.
Yea, weight is one thing I don't miss about old computers. Random trivia: SGI's CRTs often got damaged when moved because it's stand swinged back which was hard to see while lifting it, and then when set down the stand cracked with all the weight on it's edge or it might've toppled over :/
I put my back out in 2001 after moving an SGI FW900 superwide monitor (used for Onyx2) up a flight of stairs on my own. Much heavier than the usual 20 or 21" Sony CRT. When I move Octanes around these days, they're quite light by comparison. :D
For a really heavy SGI thought, gotta get an Onyx, hehe...
forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16720350
10,000 is actually a pretty good value when you look at how much more powerful it was than standard systems of the time that cost $2000- definitely more than 5 times more powerful than common systems at the time
Oh wow this video brought back memories!! I worked for several years as a 3D graphics engineer (software) at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITL) in Seattle, WA, which at the time (1991-94) was one of I think three places in the US doing full-time virtual reality research (back in the day... the - ugh - Jaron Lanier day...). They had a number of Indigo and Indigo 2 workstations, along with a VGX and an Onyx. Thank you for posting this!
Did you work on the VRD at WU? I was doing VR work in those days and that tech was fascinating.
Silicon Graphics, the manufacturer who initiated the OpenGL API development =)
Also, there were some SGi workstations in the film Disclosure. And in that film, they were used with VR kits for... opening e-mails ! 😂
Brings new meaning to "...this meeting could have been an email." 😆
I'm relieved to know that I'm not the only person that consistently measures the cost of overly-expensive products against contemporary Porsche 911's. I partly blame the Need For Speed series.
8:00 that's exactly like the main menu in Super Mario 64 and LoZ OoC!
yep that OpenGL demo was free software, and that SGI was literally a N64. of course they used the same coding!
@@SilverSpoon_ the sgi was a really fast 80 thousand dollar n64
@@SilverSpoon_ N64 was a heavily cut down SGI. One common feature of SGI work stations was that they featured dozens of processors. The N64 only had 3(the RCP was actually a separate DSP and GPU on one chip).
@@SilverSpoon_ N64 is no where near the capabilities of the SGI. N64 mostly ran at native 240p.
@@JuniorBlitz it's a console. It's here to do its job of booting a game and rendering graphics. It's like saying the PS5 can rivalize with a Ryzen powered desktop PC.
Years ago, I found one of these in a storage room at my employer's warehouse, which they once used for their R&D department. They let me take it home and it sat in my living room until 3 years ago when I moved. Probably should have kept it, (like that Commodore PET computer that sat in my garage for a long time) but I ended up giving it away because I was tired of looking at the damn thing and not knowing what to do with it.
I worked at General Motors Great Lakes Tech Center in the 90's and they used all the different versions and iterations of the SGI work stations
over that decade.
"I don't even know what i am doing, but i am having fun" that's the spirit
Let's not forget OpenGL when discussing SGI. Beyond the N64, there's 3dfx who owed their existence to SGI. GLIDE was just a proprietary watered down version of OpenGL, which was an open source version of IrisGL (SGI).
And 3dfx dared to threat7sue people who made Glide emulators. Glide, a thing which simply renamed gl to gr prefix of OpenGL functions.
I took Comp Sci between 1994 and 1997 and we used the Indigo. The web browser was Xmosaic. There was an impressive lightcycle game with 3D graphics. Those were the days.
I remember my Dad using one of these for ArcGIS work back in the 90's. What shocked me the most was the software licensing was almost as much as the hardware!
That is sadly very true, it shocked me aswell, and I was a complete SGI nut back then. Annual licensing for Alias/Maya was insane, but other sw could be a lot more. People don't realise but often the hw was not the major cost factor for some sectors.
I smell an SGI tech tales coming this way!
My closest experience with these was from elites on IRC bragging how they owned or worked on a silicon graphics workstation. There was at least one in every channel I frequented.
Zabeus I have a tech-tales like series on my channel where I discuss SGI history, if you would like to see something like that.
Big fan of yours LGR, never expected to seen an SGI! I have 3 Octanes, and Indigo2, two Indys and an O2 myself so it's neat to see your take on it. By the way, I am doing a video series about the history of SGI over on my channel, and the most recent episode covers up to the release of the Indigo2, so that might be interesting to some of the people viewing this video (shameless plug).
Excellent, I'm gonna go check that out!
The SGI C compiler is called MIPSPro, it's available for download and burning to CD here: archive.org/details/sgi_MIPSpro_All-Compiler_CD_May_1999_for_IRIX_6.5_and_later
you're the younger kid talking about the computer recycling centre's SGI machines and the AIX machine ?
gcc seems to be available as well (the GNU Compiler Collection)
Terrence Vergauwen I bought my SGIs, but I do get some machines from computer recycling centres (some of my older Macs and some still half-decent PCs of mine came from recyclers). I don't have any AIX machines, but I did briefly mention the ThinkPad 800 in my ThinksGiving Special, though I had to rely on pictures from the internet.
Thank you for all of your time and efforts you have invested in making this video available to the public.
I worked on an Indigo and an Indigo2 at university. Modelled robot workcells. Still remember free scaling of icons in the file manager and the general look and feel of their Unix System (Irix). Felt like the king of the road on this machine. And it sat in a locked room for itself, so you had it all to yourself in a quiet place with a view out of the window...
8:22 one of my favourite Unix commands, farrt
So 1GB of RAM in 1995 probably cost about $20,000?
Geez Lousie!
Serpico's Beard most people were happy to have 12 mb of ram back then
He said that 128Mb cost $10,000, so 1Gb would be nearly $80,000
+mgrein93 At the time though, 512MB kits were not an option. Strangely, even 128MB kits weren't included on the price list I received in 1996, though the Indy list did have them, 6000+ UKP and that's with an academic discount and without VAT.
By the time 512MB kits of that type were common and in use, SGI had already moved on to different tech with Octane and O2.
Funniest RAM quote I saw was for a 256MB kit for POWER Challenge in 1995 at a radar research lab, about 26K. :D (40K in USD I guess) No wonder the Onyx I obtained was originally 1M when new (it had 2GB).
I recall in the early to mid 90's a RAM manufacturing plant burned down, which sent RAM prices sky-rocketing. At one stage you could purchase 1MB RAM sticks for roughly $100 per Megabyte.
It would be the equivalent of Samsung's OLED factory burning down now, which would affect not only Samsung, but it would force Apple to source their screens elsewhere at either a higher cost or lower quality, or both.
I remember ram sticks at $100/meg. There was also Rambus trying to patent the important bits in the SDRAM spec and trying to sue the other manufacturers that sent ram prices sky high. Then around the 2000s those ram makers illegally ran a cartel to keep the price of ram high. eh.
nice! this brings back days of supporting engineers at nasa ames where we all had SGI Indigo2 desktops. That thing had an integrated ISDN interface. SGI made a lot of machines with cool strange colors.
One funny thing about the indigo2 was that the large monitor was so heavy that when it was sitting on top of the machine, it would squeeze the case too much and the memory would flake out.
Silicon Valley trivia note: the Googleplex building is the SGI headquarters office from back in the days when SGI aquired Cray computing.
The 22" monitors were ok, but some places used much bigger ones and that was a problem, hence partly why O2 and Octane were such odd shapes.
I always come away from your videos feeling good. I loved growing up with old PCs in the 90s. Thanks man, this thing is mental.
Next up for LGR: "Just got a CRAY supercomputer, let's see if it can play DOOM"
Linus Tech Tips would try to run Crysis and Rose of the Tomb Raider
Sun had their own Super computer series - like the E10K.
from what era? DOOM would probably need emulation, and run all within one core. it would be incredibly difficult to utilize the inherent power of a CRAY distributed system for something like emulated DOS DOOM. a CRAY from 2009? sure... because a single core from that era could run DOS emulation and play it but not one of the ones featured in "sneakers"; the big round thing that looks like a couch in the guy's office.
@@illilya I do know one person who runs their own Cray at home - though a later one. But he does serious engineering work based from home so he has serious computing facilities. he even has his own electron microscope which he got running himself.
@@andrewnoonan4044 it's really about the distribution of work. a Cray would only realize its strength if it was doing it across all of its resources but from what i found it seems like you'd need to write a DOS emulator that could use all the different resources and that... hasn't been done so far and to do it just so it could play Doom would be silly. only recently have games in windows even begun to use multiple cores, still just relying on the video card and all of their threads but not running anything in parallel across CPU cores.
I first thought this was a computer from an indigogo campaign somehow... :P
I used one of these as a student in the early 2000's. In a hospital in Sydney for planniing stereotactic radiation therapy. I remember how heavy it was for it's size too, lots of hardware packed in the case, had an awesome, dense feeling. The software basically was 3d modelling of radiation beams from a linear accellerator for treating brain cancer. Prince of Wales in Sydney.
4:35 displaying KG instead of us having to Google. You're doing Gods work.
Oh my, it's beautiful. And it's purple 💜💜
And mine at work was $30,000.00 which included Alias Wavefront, Photoshop, DOOM and ported Adobe Illustrator.
Note to teenage me, turns out that this is not the only computer you would ever need forever.
Clay Mann My Octane still does OK for TH-cam and Reddit. Could probably do more if I knew how to use any 90s era graphics software.
+Dodoid What graphics software? Are there any (basic) video editors for it? I assume if they made the CGI on the Indigos or an Indy (which I want), they must've also done the editing on the same machines.
I use Blender 3d on my Indigo2 (lower end). It has a great built in video editor. For video Editing however I recommend the O2 it was purpose built for that.
Dodoid
I'm not knocking the computers, it's amazing they're still usable and a testament to how powerful they were back then.
It's just that little kid me saw these and thought, if I could just save up enough, this would be the only computer you'd ever need to own. How could it get any better? lol
Generic Green Squid All sorts of editing software is available. I use PiranhaHD but I'm not very good at it...
I LOVE these phrases!!!!
4:18 ....locking into place with all the finesse of taking a sledge hammer to a bonsai tree...
5:55 ....and houses tons of technical titilation that's totally outside of my expertiese....
When combined with that pure buttery LGR voice....absolute magic!
SGI is also know to be creator of solid rock filesystem named XFS, which was release in Irix 5.
This amazing filesystem was ported to Linux in 2001.
Lots of memories here. First professional job was programming on IRIX 6.5.4 on an SGI Octane. It cost 3x as much as my car, and was generally a wonderful machine
Awesome review Clint! I'm gonna pour a nice dram of glenfiddich to celebrate ;)
Thank you, Terrence! And thanks again for lending me this wonderful beast and providing the opportunity to talk about it :)
I worked on these at Sony Imageworks from 1997-2000. All the movies worked on there went through sgi machines. Actually all vfx houses were almost all sgi based machines during the time.
Their end came with the first game cards for pc’s that came at the start of the century, and when sgi got a huge portion of nvidia shares and sent half their gpu team to nvidia. Even sgi saw the writing on the wall. But when sgi ruled it truly was a pleasure to use these machines. So ahead of their time....
My first workstation at 3M in 1992 was an Indigo. It had a whopping 32 MB of RAM, and we had to replace the 16 MB DIMS with 8 MB DIMS because at the time the 32 MB were not yet stable. The hard drive was 4 GB. My second workstation was one of the purple Indigo 2 models, but it was not loaded fully.
In the late 90's, our graphics dept. had an SGI Octane, and after office hours we used to play Unreal Tournament at the highest settings on it, it was sweet!
th-cam.com/video/AU_RV8uoTIo/w-d-xo.html
I used to work for DeBeers at a R&D station that developed diamond sorting machines. The electronics layout and 3D CAD design rooms were full of Indigo 2s and Octanes. The CAD and electronics layout guys thought they were SO special.
They were all wired up to an SGI render farm.
They were still in use until around 2002 when they were replaced with dual Intel CPU and Nvidia boxes. So when you break the cost down over their lifespan it's not so bad given all the neat stuff they could do that even the Intel's couldn't like fancy video production I/O stuff.
no surprised a soulless diamond cartel could afford an SGI render farm XD
As a 3D student, SGI has this mythical aura about it. 3D graphics innovation was almost all made on SGI hardware. I would love the SGI granite keyboard and a SGI trinitron monitor to really fit my workstation to add this vintage quality to it!
As an old school N64 developer I have worked on most all of these. They were amazing! Also the OS was really cool for the time. Great stuff.
Wait were you involved in the development of Mario 64 if you were can you please tell us some of the Beta stuff
@@NatetheNintendofan I worked on N64 games using this computer. Not Mario 64. That was done in Japan.
thanks for rocking my shirt again LGR!! it always makes me super pumped to see you wearing it 😆
Haha, you bet!
Lazy Game Reviews a bunch of my followers on tumblr were really quick to immediately send me messages telling me about it. apparently we share some fans! lol. by the way, did you know that I am working with Eric Chahi on an official comic for the game? it's going to be set as a continuity and extension of the universe. I thought you might be interested to know!
Mycaruba!
Omg the shirt is gorgeous
My uncles company had one of these in the late 90's for use in mining. I remember creeping upstairs to have a look at it and was pretty amazed but didn't know what to do with it. My uncle said it was a choice of buying a computer or buying a car.
Quite scary that sometimes companies and individuals were faced with such choices, but then such was the nature of the advanced tech and the prices it could command. At one point in early 1997 I was contemplating a 12K loan (that's UKP) to buy an O2, but then SGI loaned me one for free (still use it) which I used to do OS bug-hunting and general IRIX testing for them for a while; it was the first loan they did to a private individual outside the US. Supplied as an R5K/200, it's now an R7K/600 maxed out up the wazoo with a 7-slot Avid PCI expansion box, two 300GB SCSI disks (I plan on replacing them with SSDs this year) and 1GB RAM using low-power single-sided 128MB DIMMs (hard to find).
Ian.
I can't even describe the buzz I had each time I looked at my Indigo 2. No other computer or any thing, ever, would ever give me this fuzzy feeling I'd get after pressing on the power button hidden behind the hinged front cover. Seeing the SGI reflective chrome logo spinning on the screen and working with Wavefront Explore and Alias Power Animator was the closest I got to experiencing real world magic!
In the early part of the 2000s, I used to work for the company that repaired the circuit boards from all those machines. I personally worked on the Origin 2000, onyx2 servers and the High end graphics pipeline units. Pretty high end stuff, even in the early 2000s. Ironically, those big units were all tied to an Indy system as their terminal interface. I may or may not have played the original ported Doom on the machines during my break times... ;)
I don't suppose any schematics & suchlike have survived from that time? Nowadays repair has become a vital aspect of keeping SGIs going, as the supply of spares has basically dried up.
Clint, officially one of my favourite videos on youtube right now. i have always been fascinated with the sgi systems but you covered it perfectly. thank you!
And thanks for watching, I'm glad you enjoyed.
you should do a Tech Tales on SG! that would be awesome.
are they still around?
no, they disapersed in may 11, 2009.
You should also do Tech Tales on Digital Equipment Corporation, Tandy Corp., and Sun Microsystems.
Yes please!
I think a video on Tandy would be particularly interesting since they made more than computers and were originally a leather company. However, eventually they bought out Radio Shack and then when Radio Shack became profitable they spun-off their leather manufacturing division. Then things went south for Tandy Corp. in the 1990's and they went out of business in 1999, but the Tandy Leather Company which the spun-off as it's own company in 1975 still exist.
I remeber these from my days as a tech in the university, our IT person was running it as a mail server, client logon authetification, cad machine, and numerous Academic uses.. but at the weekend it was.turned into our hexen games server where we could dial up from home and play each other ... ah ...great days .. imagine trying to do that nowadays with company equipmemt eek..
Companies use remote desktop now. With what's been coming out about China's shenanigans it's no wonder companies don't allow employees direct access to networks anymore.
An SGI, NeXT cube, and a SPARC workstation. That's my holy trinity of stuff I'd love to own. I love older, more "oddball" systems as it were.
I bought an Indigo Impact back in the nineties. I loved it! I also owned a Sun Sparc 20. I wish I still had them.
That must have been extremely expensive! What sort of work were you using both machines for?
Man, I like your videos. It brings back such great memories from a time when I started to explore computers. Today you see people line up almost two blocks at an Apple Store to get the new iPhone. I remember in my time when the Vic 20 and Commodore 64 came out that we slept in a tent in front of the store for the weekend to be sure we could buy one Monday morning. Over here in The Netherlands there was only one store who sold them. I never forget every Thursday evening 19h. We have a radio station called Radio 2. They aired every Thursday evening 2h long nothing else then Commodore 64 software. Tools, games and so on. We had to use a cassette players to record everything. Then you could load the software in to your Commodore 64. The Good ole Days.
This brought back memories for me. In the early 90s my dad got a job teaching drafting at the local vocational school, and he convinced them that CAD was the way to teach rather than drafting by hand. Overnight, they managed to swap out the teaching lab from drafting tables to drafting computers, and he somehow even conned them into buying an Indigo-1. I was still in elementary school, but I think I ended up spending more time on it than anyone else.
Dreamworks used to use the giant 16- CPU Onyx servers in their rendering farm. I had friends that worked there in the 90s so I got a tour of their data center. A few years later I went to work for an ISP who used SGI servers for web hosting so I spent sometime working with IrIX.
I bought one of these in the early 2000's. It was a great little box. Ran doom wonderfully. The 21" display is still my foot rest. Such nostalgia.
I couldn't find a mirror of the irix repo I used to use, (It was hosted by SGI, but appears to be down now) but I did find this:
www.nekochan.net/weblog/archives/irix-software/
Hopefully there's some useful stuff there for anyone who wants some.
John Emory Use nekoware.bufferoverflow.xyz
... It cost as much as a Porsche 911 back when it was new... That just fucked my brain.
They had an Indigo 2 at my college in the early 00s. Wish I had known any of this about it. As far as I knew it was just a.n. other machine in the Unix lab!
They had one (maybe two) at my college in 97-98, in the VR lab. I remember the grad students using it. However, it wasn't the most powerful computer in that room.
it was my workstation in 1994, working on 3D software for pipeline simulation on nuclear plant, at EDF, the french electric operator :)
I remember reading a lot about SGI in the 90's, and they definitely seemed like the best thing money could buy. Not my money, obviously. It seemed like it was soooo far ahead of anything else available to consumers, both technically but certainly also aesthetically. Comparing these to the typical beige or grey boxes of the time, these were just much more futuristic! Honestly, they don't even look that dated yet (until you open them, obviously).
When I got to university in 1993 they had just installed new Indy's. I first was impressed by the 486DX-33 Win 3.11 machines, until I figured out what unix a month later and got an account on the Indy's.
Then they totally blew me away. 100 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 1280x1024 21" monitor, Full 3D graphics, 16bit stereo sound, Indycam webcam.
And the PhD's had even more powerful Indigo's.
1GB of RAM isn't totally out of question even today. Clean Windows 10 will boot and allow rudimentary internet browsing on a system with 1GB of RAM... Heck, probably Win 10 ported to that machine, running on its graphics hardware and CPU, would be usable. Not the snappiest, but usable.
@@absurdengineering Really weird to me that Windows 10 is your default. A proper and free operating system optimized by people all over the world (e.g. GNU/Linux, BSD) is going to work much better.
@@absurdengineering wonder if WoA could be ported.
@@SoundToxin I agree Windows shouldn't be the first go to OS.
Man, that is one sexy computer.
Moonbeam the colour is the same as my phone case
Silicon Graphics was at the leading edge back in the day. I managed these, along with Solaris and AIX boxes way back when.
Having this this is like having an historical car.
1 GB of Ram? Isn't that a liiiitle bit overboard? Would anything you do on a machine like that ever come close to using that much?
these machines were used for all kinds of scientific research, running simulations of HUGE datasets. Some of SGI's larger machines had dozens of GBs of RAM...
SGI are the lads that created the OpenGL standard previously IRIS GL. Their systems were built for higher end application at the time be it graphics related or dealing with larger numbers. Not too strange.
Their Origin2000 from 1996 can take theoretically use up to 512GB.
You need it for really complex 3d animating and modelling
In my head at that time the word "giga" wouldnt even exist
Holy shit, an Out of This World t-shirt? Amazing.
yea.... i need one for some reasons. one of the best sega game i play
Dorelaxen artist if the shirt here, thank you !
Lester Knight Chaykin Oh wow! I love your art, been following for a couple years now :D
Lol, that's two LGR vids I've gotten comments on now for my flag. Sure does trigger a lot of morons.
quality, accurate avatar if i do say so
The engineers at work were using these when I first started. We had a few Indys as well. Thanks for the memories!
Amazing machines, our designers used to use them to simulate design for disassembly processes.
When you walked into the design studio, it was like entering another world.