[HN Gopher] A $36,000 Graphical Workstation from 1993 - SGI Indi...
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A $36,000 Graphical Workstation from 1993 - SGI Indigo 2
Author : doener
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-08-15 14:19 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| hmsp wrote:
| These things were so awesome back in the 90s. I got to use quite
| a few of them and even owned a couple in the early 2000s as they
| were being thrown away.
|
| It always blew my mind that systems like SGI and SUN existed and
| yet somehow windows was allegedly cutting edge.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| Windows NT - the OS to run on comparable computers - was
| cutting edge, and still is in many ways. Don't be fooled by the
| similarly named products made for 100x less powerful computers.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| What computers that ran NT in the 90's were "100x more
| powerful" than UNIX workstations, exactly?
| anthk wrote:
| NT and intel didn't catch up SGI/Mips and Dec/Alpha until the
| Pentium III, and in the case of the Alpha, even the 800MHZ
| one was subpar against the Alpha.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| I'm not sure it was a much considered cutting edge rather it
| was considered cost effective. 99.99% of office workers did not
| need this kind of workstation, windows systems were cheaper and
| became ubiquitous.
| hmsp wrote:
| Oh I agree.
|
| I mainly meant "to the general public" this (windows 98) was
| cutting edge.
|
| Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late
| 90's and early 2000's even apples share was tiny.
|
| It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of
| using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.
|
| I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3
| windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac
| just worked.
|
| The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use
| SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the
| exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them
| anytime one broke I'd just boot a Linux CD and use "nc" and
| "dd" to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in
| question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was
| just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user
| just thought I'd fixed their computer.
|
| It was a fun time.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the
| late 90's and early 2000's even apples share was tiny.
|
| It wasn't even very convenient to read e-mails. GUI e--mail
| programs were not up to the Eudora level on those machines.
| And heaven forbid you needing a spreadsheet.
| anthk wrote:
| By 1999/2001 I think you already had Star office.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Linux or Windows NT combined with gpu companies like Nvdia ate
| into everything that made SGI successful.
|
| As a geek, I miss exotic Unix hardware with their shapes,
| colors, and RISC chips. As a nerd, who needs that when AMD64
| and Nvdia get the job done.
| hmsp wrote:
| I once had a magical collection of chips from old Unix
| workstations - dec alphas and vax, dig and sun. I was
| responsible for cleaning out a large storage room of
| computers from the 70s-90s and I pulled all the processors I
| could because they were amazing objects to look at.
|
| I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the
| KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.
|
| I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time
| in the end.
|
| It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this
| old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an
| absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays
| running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI's around the
| edges.
|
| But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux.
| There was just no competition and as much as I loved the
| legacy Unix stuff it wasn't as nice or as easy to run as open
| source alternatives.
|
| I'm glad I got to play in that world though.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| > I'm glad I got to play in that world though.
|
| What made it so exciting? Was it just the novelty aspect of
| having different flavors, architecture, and environments?
| rbanffy wrote:
| For me it was the diversity. Even though the machines
| themselves were similar, some did some things a lot
| better than the others. Some had ridiculously fast disk
| IO (the Suns, usually), some had silky smooth mouse
| movements (the SGIs), and so on. Also, there were the
| different GUIs - I loved Sun's OpenWindows - and SGIs
| could use better font smoothing (but only NeXT was doing
| that back then).
| jmclnx wrote:
| I usually do not watch videos, but this one was very nice.
| crest wrote:
| Oh an old "Indy without the go."
| sillywalk wrote:
| The Indy was an Indigo without the go.
| apercu wrote:
| I bought one when I started an ISP, could have used intel with
| Linux but Linux was very very new. After the ISP was acquired
| (just the customers, not the hardware) I had the Indy in my
| apartment for a bit, but someone really wanted it and I was able
| to sell it for decent change.
|
| Did anyone else notice that they made strange clicking sounds?
| mst wrote:
| My first ISP environment back in '00 was a mixture of FreeBSD
| and BSDi, though we did eventually acquire a Mandrake box to
| trial linux on.
| apercu wrote:
| This was '94/95, Linux was an option but _just_ barely....
| jprd wrote:
| Spinning drive noises?
| apercu wrote:
| I always assumed the click was the drive but never knew. The
| rhythm reminded me of the old 70's Battlestar Galactica Cylon
| eyes. It was a weird, slow click.
| yardie wrote:
| I got to use one of these when I worked at printer. It ran EFI
| Fiery and was probably overkill for RIPing printing plates with a
| laser etcher.
| fidotron wrote:
| There was at least one RIP company (name forgotten) that
| repackaged SGI machines with their software as single purpose
| devices. That was definitely a thing for a while.
|
| For those unfamiliar a RIP took postscript input and spits out
| very high resolution black/white images for each separate ink,
| factoring in all the halftone generation etc.
| dmbaggett wrote:
| We used these to make Crash Bandicoot and we even had a mode
| where you could run on the game on the SGI. It was ... sort of
| ... playable.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It makes sense - SGIs and PlayStations were all MIPS back then.
| julienchastang wrote:
| Surprisingly entertaining video. It was on a workstation similar
| to this one that I first used the Mosaic web browser circa 1993.
| Strangely, the first web site I visited featured a picture of Al
| Gore (not making this up) then US VP. I cannot find a reference
| to that web site anywhere or what content it may have contained.
| Does anyone else remember this?
| neilv wrote:
| It might've been the original whitehouse.gov, which was a
| fairly early Web server (before they were called "sites").
|
| This archive is from later (IIRC, HTML table layout wasn't yet
| used in 1993): https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/
|
| Reportedly, whitehouse.gov was implemented in Common Lisp.
| (This was before the dotcom gold rush, so a lot of Web stuff
| was done by fringe Internet/computer uber-nerds -- mostly "this
| is interesting", and not usually "this pays money".)
| lispm wrote:
| > whitehouse.gov
|
| Not all. The publications distribution feature was implement
| in Common Lisp.
|
| > so a lot of Web stuff was done by fringe Internet/computer
| uber-nerds
|
| That part was actually done by a team from MIT.
| qingcharles wrote:
| A lot of my early web projects were written in C. Everyone
| else seemed to be using perl. Doing a lot of string stuff in
| C was annoying.
| rbanffy wrote:
| In Perl it was less annoying, but I agree - C doesn't
| really have strings in any convenient sense.
| cyphax wrote:
| I love these work stations. Many (15+) years ago I used an Indy
| like a sort of dumb terminal, using X forwarding. It was very
| cool to use an application like a modern Firefox on such an old
| Unix installation even if it really ran remotely. It worked quite
| well remoting from a modern Ubuntu computer. I still have the
| Indy (and a small assortment of other old SGI machines, including
| 2 Indigo 2s), reviving these machines is on my bucket/todo list.
| This video sure makes me want to grab one (the Indigo mostly) and
| get all nerdy. Would love to see more!
| neilv wrote:
| In probably 1999, I had a borrowed old Indigo 2 (probably with
| IMPACT graphics) in my dorm room... used only as a generic
| general-purpose Unix workstation, not for 3D.
|
| I replaced it with a modest Linux box, which was much more
| practical (Celeron 500MHz, 128MB RAM, basic Matrox G200 graphics,
| non-fruit-colored case): https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-
| pc-2000/
| justanother wrote:
| As a longhaired teenager, I rarely got the chance to physically
| touch these things (although it did happen a couple times).
| Mostly I remember telnetting into a machine, noticing that it was
| Irix, and being able to login as "4Dgifts" without a password for
| a root shell. The joy was short-lived though, because as soon as
| you tried to build software (regardless of how "portable" the
| package was), you ran into interesting problems, if the compilers
| were even installed. I eventually got to spend several days with
| a Webforce Indy and its fancy (what we would now call a) webcam,
| where I took my first-ever selfie in 1995 and made my peace with
| the dev environment. These lil things were definitely ahead of
| their time, even if their price tags weren't.
| mst wrote:
| I used an Indigo2 with a pair of 21" Sony 13w3 monitors (one
| rebadged as Sun, one as CGI) as my desktop for a couple years.
|
| When I finally had reason to swap it out for a more normal
| system, it went down to London to become a CPAN testers smoke
| testing machine until the hardware finally gave out.
|
| Fantastic piece of kit. I especially liked that when we had a few
| weeks of power blips if I came home to see 'power brownout
| detected' as a console log entry (it always survived them fine
| itself) that was a useful indicator to go through all my x86 kit
| and bring the casualties back up.
| steeeeeve wrote:
| I can't even imagine how awesome that would have been.
| Honestly.
| mst wrote:
| That was in ... '04 ish? And, yes, it was indeed awesome.
|
| As with all my desktops since time immemorial, its purpose
| was to provide an X11 environment that I used to ssh to
| everything else, so I never really stressed the machine
| itself.
|
| This isn't (I think, memory fuzzy at this remove) a
| screenshot from that box, but it'll give you a feel for what
| one of my monitors would be displaying -
| https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg
|
| Zero use of any of the shiny, just treating it as a solid old
| school workstation - the closest I had to a complaint was
| that it took me a little while to adjust to the level of fan
| noise.
|
| With a remote browser instance to deal with the billion tons
| of JS I wouldn't at all mind going back to that setup today.
|
| But it served valiantly in its subsequent life, so I feel I
| treated it with the respect it deserved.
|
| (also because nobody really cared about that sort of kit at
| the time the Indigo2 and the monitors were cheap pickups off
| ebay, I'm not sure I've ever had better "bang for the buck"
| from building out a work setup)
| emchammer wrote:
| What graphics option did you have? Two 13W3 outputs?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Those were such nice machines. Good graphics, good processors,
| good memory, good OS. They were a joy to work on.
|
| Did anyone else play BZFlag on them?
| fidotron wrote:
| The 90s SGI machines were great, for graphics, but it is
| mystifying how many people used them as standard workstations
| given things like Suns had better CPUs. Toy Story was designed on
| SGIs and rendered on Suns for a reason after all.
|
| The great oddity of SGIs was the multimedia peripherals worked
| properly, and this is the bit of the experience the NT and Linux
| replacements never quite managed.
| YZF wrote:
| I used to have that same ViewSonic monitor used in the video for
| some time and I think I just recycled it. Mixed feelings seeing
| someone actually wanting to use one ;)
|
| SGI's workstations were super cool. I think I saw one or two in
| action but never got to actually use one. Another cool graphics
| workstation from that period was IBM's RS/6000, I remember seeing
| a demo of Catia running on that and it blew my mind.
|
| I'm curious how current day GPU architecture traces its heritage
| to earlier 3d acceleration if at all. IIRC 3d hardware at the day
| was about rendering shaded triangles + Z buffer.
| anthk wrote:
| BTW tons of Gopher users from SDF (gopher://sdf.org , use the
| search option at Veronica) have screenshots and daily usage of
| SGI machines with modern software ported into Irix.
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