[HN Gopher] Show HN: My new wiki for Silicon Graphics stuff
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Show HN: My new wiki for Silicon Graphics stuff
I also run IRIXNet. I'm here to share my newest SGI-related
project.
Author : ThatGuyRaion
Score : 78 points
Date : 2025-02-25 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tech-pubs.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tech-pubs.net)
| blankx32 wrote:
| Images broken?
| ThatGuyRaion wrote:
| Where?
| foldor wrote:
| How about adding information about IDO, like the static
| recompilation project being used in N64 game decompilation
| projects? It enables compiling code in a linux environment and
| having it match 1:1 as if it were run by the original compiler.
| There's even significant progress in decompiling the entire
| codebase as well.
|
| https://github.com/decompals/ido-static-recomp
|
| https://github.com/decompals/ido-matching-decomp
| ThatGuyRaion wrote:
| As time permits! I'm the only current article writer at this
| time
| tombert wrote:
| I guess I sort of get it, but I always kind of wondered why
| Silicon Graphics never made a "prosumer" computer. With the (kind
| of) exception of the Nintendo 64, it seems like most of the
| Silicon Graphics machines were tens of thousands of dollars in
| the 90's.
|
| I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics
| had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix
| and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it. For that
| matter, I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Nintendo had
| released kits for the N64 that let you use it more as a computer.
|
| I'm just thinking that it's all about timing; if they had
| released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out,
| would Apple have its same market position now? Would we all be
| using SGiPhones? Would every tech startup get all their engineers
| little SGI laptops?
| browningstreet wrote:
| I had an Indy on my desk when it came out, with a 21" CRT
| monitor. I think they thought that's what the Indy was. I'd
| still go downstairs to another lab to play with the NeXT cube
| that was there.
|
| It was the culture of the time -- they didn't want to move
| downmarket and seem like PCs, so they (and their competitors)
| kept the workstation class a bit more premium and hoped to get
| enough business/tech purchases from the likes of academia and
| entertainment. They weren't really trying to sell to devs so
| much.
| tombert wrote:
| I am sure there was a whole bunch of factors, but, at least
| from my lay perspective, it seems like a recurring theme was
| that these companies kind of underestimated how good even
| relatively cheap Intel CPUs were going to get in the 90's,
| making it so that even consumers could afford a pretty
| powerful computer, or at least powerful enough to be
| "useful", and then it becomes less obvious why you'd spend
| $5,000-15,000+ on a fancy workstation; if I can get 80% of
| the value of an SGI with just a decent Pentium and a bit of
| extra RAM, for 1/4 the cost, most people are going to go with
| that.
|
| Of course, I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm confident
| a lot of people on HN know more about this than I do, this is
| just a Wikipedia-level understanding of this seems to
| indicate to me.
|
| Still, I do like to think about it. A part of me thinks, and
| I have no way to confirm this, that there might have been
| bigger ambitions for the N64, to convert it into a "real"
| computer, so you could have a "real" SGI machine at home
| (though obviously less powerful than an Indy or something).
| octorian wrote:
| One thing about this period that kinda annoyed me in the
| tech press, is that it always felt like these companies
| were making new/better computers for "their existing
| customers" as if they were only ever competing against
| their own older products.
|
| Another thing, which perhaps "grinds my gears" a lot more,
| is that this late-90's/early-00's shift to PCs happened
| _before_ Linux was sufficiently taken seriously. So lots of
| high-end applications that started on UNIX migrated over to
| Windows NT. And once you 're firmly on Windows, its _much_
| harder to go to Linux. (Whereas commercial UNIX to Linux is
| easy.)
|
| So now there are whole markets (that used to support
| commercial UNIX) where Linux users get the middle finger,
| and as someone who hates Windows, this really ticks me off.
| tombert wrote:
| I hate Windows now because I'm comparing it to modern
| Linux and macOS, but in the 90's wasn't Windows NT pretty
| competitive with some of the commercial Unix offerings? I
| thought it had some pretty cool stuff in regards to non-
| blocking IO, and NTFS was pretty ahead of its time
| compared to most of the Unix filesystems at the time I
| think?
|
| I wasn't really writing code in the 90s, so it's tough
| for me to say with confidence, but I thought I read
| somewhere that Windows NT was, in some regards,
| objectively better than most of its competition in the
| 90's.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| This is pretty much correct. Windows NT was far better
| than DOS and feature competitive with the Unices of the
| time, along with being available on more modest hardware.
|
| The Unix wars were also raging, and compatibility
| _between_ Unices still hadn 't been sorted out (and
| arguably never was) so a company with workstation class
| software had to port their code between mostly compatible
| operating systems and wildly incompatible GUI frameworks.
| So shipping an NT product wasn't the big deal that it
| seemed.
| tombert wrote:
| That makes sense; even within the Linux world in the year
| of our lord 2025, binary compatibility is still kind of
| an issue. I have had issues getting regular Linux
| binaries working in NixOS [1], and even getting stuff
| working between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and Fedora can be a
| pain.
|
| It totally makes sense why developers would see Windows
| NT as the future here; it gave you most of the features
| you'd want from Unix-land (and I think some new stuff too
| that wasn't available in Unix?), and having "platform to
| rule them all" is appealing to most developers for
| obvious reasons. It doesn't hurt that Win32 isn't too
| hard to code against (at least it wasn't when I played
| with it 15 years ago).
|
| I do find it a bit strange that there wasn't really a "de
| facto" Unix that people coded against, like a clear
| winner that people liked, but I guess if the hardware was
| too expensive to run it, that's going to cut down on
| usage; we didn't really get "standard Unix" until OS X.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42703720
| p_ing wrote:
| The NT kernel was designed around non-blocking async I/O;
| all I/O in NT is async and leveraged completion ports. I
| believe Solaris is the only other OS with IOCP.
|
| Back then, Linux had either a primitive scheduler or O(n)
| scheduler, until 2003. NT shipped with an O(1) scheduler.
|
| I personally feel NT still does high pressure memory
| management better than Linux. No opinion about other
| OSes, although macOS will ask the user what to force quit
| -- then again, given people have been seeing memory
| ballooning in random apps, including OOTB apps on macOS
| 15... Apple has other issues.
|
| NT is great. It's just plagued by Win32. And those
| designers...
|
| https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~scott/courses/Spring01/111/sl
| ide...
|
| > In 1996, more NT server licenses were sold than UNIX
| licenses
| bombcar wrote:
| I feel there was a real mental block (that Linux partially
| helped destroy, mind you) that "real computing" couldn't be
| done on "commodity chips".
|
| And then the Internet blew everything up and out, and Linux
| machines were cheap and capable of web serving just as well
| as any workstation.
| dekhn wrote:
| I got a lot of flack from leadership at the lab where I
| worked in '97 and '98 when I bought Dual Pentium Pro 200MHz
| and later a Dual Pentium II 400MHz that ran Linux. They
| asked why I didn't buy HP, or SGI desktops. I pointed out
| that the grant i had- for $5K - wasn't really enough to buy
| a single machine (our lab had the cheapest SGI Indy, which
| IIRC was $10K) from HP or SGI, while for that amount of
| money, I could get dual processor experience, and more
| RAM/disk than the lowest-end HP or SGI. I ported many codes
| over from SGI/Tru64 to Linux on those machines.
|
| Later I got a $15K budget to build a cluster, and again was
| asked why I didn't just buy a single SGI machine, and I
| pointed out I was able to get _six_ PCs, each of which was
| 50% the speed of a single SGI machine, and I could cluster
| them to get experience running MPI jobs. 10 years later,
| all the labs had retired their non-Linux machines aand were
| running various white box PCs or HP servers running Linux,
| and I had 10+years of experience running HPC jobs on Linux
| clusters.
|
| If you had a very large budget you could get high-end SGIs
| that had custom capabilities that no PC at the time could
| match but even then I specifically chose to not need those
| capabilities until they were commodity.
| jefflinwood wrote:
| That's kind of what they were trying to do with the 320 and
| 540.
|
| I worked on their e-commerce store, you could configure and buy
| and ship one from the web site in 1999-2000.
|
| The prices were still really high.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| They could have been NVidia (at best, more realistically 3dfx),
| but certainly not Apple.
| tombert wrote:
| Genuine question...why not?
|
| The reason I ask, it's not like they were just making
| "components" like 3dfx or Nvidia at the time, they were
| making end-to-end workstations. Why is it such a stretch to
| think that they could have taken on Apple, especially since
| Apple in the 90s was kind of languishing?
| bombcar wrote:
| It was hard enough for Apple to take on Apple.
|
| Next basically tried, and only survived by being acquired.
|
| If they had wanted to survive, they needed to buy Dell at
| the right time.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Back then, when SGI quit the graphics business and went to
| supercomputers only (having NUMA as IP, and going with Linux)
| the GPU devs each ended up at Nvidia.
|
| Apple had to pick Be, Inc. or NeXT (who had Jobs). They went
| with the latter. Be, later on, went to Palm, but that was too
| little, too late.
|
| SGI was one of the many Unix mastodons who fell victim of PC
| hardware (x86-32, then x86-64) and Windows NT, Linux being
| good enough, with Apple taking the piece for graphics
| designers and audio engineering (many whom came from Amiga,
| and SGI). Oh, and I forgot to mention: they bet on the Intel
| Itanic.
|
| I wouldn't pay a dime for these nowadays. Way too slow /
| inefficient W/performance. Which is really sad, but with
| current energy prices I just wouldn't be able to afford my
| Octane 2 using 1 kW anymore. I owned many SGI machines,
| really loved them (the sound card in the Indy was insanely
| good! And IndyCam from a time when hardly anyone had a
| webcam). Indy (various, including Challenger S), Indigo
| (including purple remake), Indigo 2, and Octane 2. But never
| an O2 :) nor a Fuel or Tezro ;) cases, although plastic and
| sensitive to scratches, were great aesthetical, too. While I
| would not want such machine anymore, I will cherish the
| memories though! Plus, there are some people reusing the
| cases. Cool beans! IMNSHO, SGI machines like Indy belong in
| any half decent Unix museum.
| tombert wrote:
| At a previous apartment, I managed to convince my wife we
| needed a giant server rack, so I started looking on
| Craigslist and eBay for one.
|
| I really wanted an SGI server rack because I thought it
| looked cool, and because I found them historically very
| interesting, but sadly those appear to have a bit of a
| collectors' market and are too expensive. Instead, I ended
| up buying a Sun Microsystems rack, which to be fair is also
| pretty cool historically.
|
| I would love to buy a broken SGI machine and put some
| modern hardware in there, just for the aesthetic. Maybe
| someday.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > I would love to buy a broken SGI machine and put some
| modern hardware in there, just for the aesthetic. Maybe
| someday.
|
| The closest you can easily get is the 230/330/550 cases
| which are strait up ATX. I have a 550 case with a
| threadripper in it. The only issue was I had to modify
| the 750W PSU to fit in the case by replacing the IEC
| inlet with a short pigtail cord.
| tomwheeler wrote:
| Application compatibility mattered a lot back then. There was
| no Microsoft Word or Excel for IRIX and Google Docs / Google
| Sheets didn't exist, for example. Many of the prosumers
| wouldn't have been able to use it as a daily driver. I recall
| that Adobe ported Photoshop to IRIX at one point, but I think
| it was gone by '97.
| tombert wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is a chicken-egg problem though;
| IRIX didn't have enough of a user base to justify porting
| over a lot of these applications, and because they didn't
| have these applications it couldn't develop a user base big
| enough, etc.
|
| I think what you're saying is totally correct, if you're
| going to be spending a lot of money on a computer, you need
| to make sure it can actually do the stuff you need it to, and
| in the 90's that does more or less imply Microsoft Office
| compatibility.
|
| Still, I do kind of wonder if SGI had actually tried to
| penetrate this market, that maybe they could have made this
| work. They could have licensed and ported some of these
| applications over themselves, and if they had gotten big
| enough then maybe some of these companies would have ported
| these things over.
|
| It's tough to say.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Well, they tried producing high end Windows NT machines at
| one point, that would have run Office, had OpenGL support,
| etc. But no one bought them. So its not clear that doing
| the same but with Irix would have gone any better.
|
| The last-gasp part of SGI I would have like to have seen
| develop was Cellular IRIX. If I recall it was a sort of
| distributed OS where the scheduler was node aware and could
| parcel out tasks within a single process to other nodes.
| What NFS did for the local/remote file system split, Irix
| would do for compute. Never came to fruition.
| tombert wrote:
| That sounds pretty cool, I guess the idea was that the
| scheduler could figure out smartly where to put
| applications and minimize latency in the process?
| MisterTea wrote:
| > why Silicon Graphics never made a "prosumer" computer
|
| They were stuck in a hopeless corporate mindset where their
| customers were all deep pocket mega corps. You had to go
| through a sales process to buy one, there was no demo machine
| at the local computer shop. They also had a brain damaged sales
| team that would do things like e.g. under-spec hardware with
| too little RAM to make a sale leaving customers with costly
| hardware that struggled under loads damaging their reputation
| (e.g. imagine a class room full of underspecd machines leaving
| students thinking "this pos made Jurassic Park?").
|
| > if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than
| $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D
| processing stuff with it.
|
| They would look exactly like the Indy or the later O2 which
| were their entry level machines.
|
| > I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Nintendo had
| released kits for the N64 that let you use it more as a
| computer.
|
| I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text a
| bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any
| substantial text work impractical (e.g. word processing or code
| editing). However, a better N64 fantasy IMO would be to include
| an optical drive in addition to the cart slot, double the RAM,
| increase the pitiful 4kb texture cache, then for good measure -
| N64 themed kb, mouse and Ethernet adapter ;-).
|
| > I'm just thinking that it's all about timing; if they had
| released something in 1997 for "prosumers",
|
| That line would be the SGI Visual Workstations. The first two,
| the 320 and 540 had custom motherboards with SGI chipset, RAM
| and GPU. The GPU used unified memory and you needed to buy
| expensive custom SGI RAM DIMMS. They only ever ran Win NT 4.0
| and 2k because of the GPU drivers. Then there was the 230, 330,
| and 550 - strait up ATX Wintel boxes with Nvidia cards. My main
| desktop is a 550 case with a Threadripper in it. But again,
| IMO, they had no clue how to sell to small shops and
| individuals and by then, too little, too late.
| tombert wrote:
| > I think SD TV's of the time would have made rendering text
| a bit difficult forcing you to use large font making any
| substantial text work impractical
|
| Yeah, in this hypothetical conversion kit they've have to
| give you some kind of better connections to plug into a
| monitor, and obviously some kind of conversion kit, maybe a
| double-expansion-pak, and maybe some kind of external optical
| drive or something similar to the N64 DD with a CD drive.
|
| I dunno, I don't think it would necessarily have failed, but
| we'll obviously never really know. Sony did that with the
| OtherOS stuff for awhile on the PS3, and I think there was a
| subset of people who really liked it for scientific
| computing.
| nyrikki wrote:
| The SGI Indy was their low end line with a price starting
| around the $5K range which was much cheaper than the Indigo2
| line. That was about the same price range as a Dell Dimension
| Pro150 at the time.
|
| They went on an acquisition binge in the mid 90's buying Cray,
| Alias, Wavefront and, Intergraph just when the PC industry
| busses where starting to catch up and they they announced that
| they were dumping MIPS and moving to Itanium....
|
| But the sub $2k price wasn't really possible. Remember even the
| 256K version of the Pentium Pro was more than $1000 for the CPU
| alone in the mid 90's.
|
| The UNIX Wars, PC improvements, NT optimism, Itanium mess and a
| directionless M&A killed a lot of companies. Dec, Novell, SGI
| etc...
|
| Dell targeted that high end consumer market, with enthusiasts
| as a their target to avoid the higher support costs and low
| profit of the home market.
|
| As someone who was running SGI's at the turn of the century in
| the movie industry...nothing about SGI really promoted brand
| loyalty, it was a tool to run software that you needed. Once
| Maya was ported to linux, you were far better off running a
| cluster than buying more expensive SGI units.
|
| The good old days almost never were. I still remember having to
| re-insert the same CD what felt like dozens of time for even a
| simple IRIX install. I also remember that the remote install
| required bootp, tftp, and password-less root _rsh!_ on the
| server...so you ended up using the CD 's to install.
|
| That said, I do miss CXFS and CXVM, their clustered filesystem.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah that's fair, as I mentioned, I wasn't really doing
| anything with Silicon Graphics in the 90s, so I'm only able
| to look back at this stuff from a kind of historical
| perspective, and it's easy for these things to kind of feel
| more legendary than they actually were as a result.
|
| $2,000 might have been a bit ambitious, but sub $3,000 does
| seem like it was achievable, but it does make sense that Dell
| kind of swooped in and took that market.
|
| You know, it's weird, because I always kind of considered
| Linux as a bit of a niche geeky thing. I run it, I like it,
| but I always sort of felt like I was the weird one, and I
| think for consumers I am, but reading about this stuff it
| looks like Linux caught on in workstation space pretty
| quickly. I noticed that the expensive professional video
| editing software has been used in Linux for awhile, it's just
| the consumer and prosumer side that struggled, and as you
| mentioned it has had a port to Maya for quite awhile.
| martinpw wrote:
| > it looks like Linux caught on in workstation space pretty
| quickly.
|
| At least for film and visual effects, this is because the
| industry was previously dominiated by SGI and most major
| studios had pipelines built on IRIX.
|
| When NT systems became cost competitive, those studios were
| reluctant to switch even though the hardware was
| compelling, due to major challenges with the OS switch.
| However once Linux came along, it was easy since the OS was
| so similar. Cheaper hardware, same-ish OS. Done deal.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Even a sub-$3k SGI would have been extremely difficult to
| pull off. PC manufacturers, even ones making higher end
| workstations, benefitted from Intel's economies of scale.
| Even if they were ordering custom motherboards they were
| picking a lot of components out of a catalog.
|
| SGI machines had a lot more bespoke components. Even if
| they chased higher volumes they would have a far smaller
| scale than the PC space. Even then how would SGI chase
| volume even if they had a "cheap" option? They had no
| experience with retail sales. None of their reps would have
| tried to sell machines with lower price tags and sacrifice
| a commission.
|
| The Indy (at $5k to start) was derided as an "Indigo
| without the go". I don't think SGI would have had any
| success building their own take on the PowerMac 4400. If an
| Indy couldn't make SGI customers happy there would be no
| way for a lower spec machine to do so.
| nyrikki wrote:
| While way too complex to accurately flesh out here, Linux
| took off mainly because the GNU userland had been in
| progress for almost a decade before and was ready, while
| the legal issues and rift on the 386BSD caused it to miss
| the window of common cdrom drives and the commercial
| internet.
|
| But yes, I remember being forced to do some silly radio
| show in ~1997-8 where I was brought in to talk about Linux,
| as I had saved him a lot of money setting up
| DNS/Sendmail/Pop on PC's vs the decstations he was using.
|
| Harley Hahn was the other person on the show, and despite
| Nasa and others using it, he was insistent that it would
| _never_ replace commercial unix.
|
| As I was maintaining OSF/1, SunOS, Irix, Interactive, SCO,
| AIX, AT&T, coherent UNIXs at that point, along with systems
| like MPE/IX, os400, OS/2, NT, Netware etc... day to day; it
| was quite obvious how much time and money it saved.
|
| IIRC SCO single user desktop license w/networking was ~$800
| and you had to pay another $600 more to get the development
| kit...without updates.
|
| Obviously the huge bump in popularity was when LAMP became
| popular.
| dekhn wrote:
| Closest thing I can think of is this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation It had
| some custom hardware choices different from typical PCs of the
| day (IIRC it had a crossbar instead of a system bus. It needed
| a special HAL to boot NT; Windows 2000 was the last version
| that supported the machine. It was extremely expensive for its
| capabilities and everybody in my lab looked at it and concluded
| "SGI is dead."
| gregw2 wrote:
| I spent years thinking about this at the time, and wrote up a
| crystalized super-long "why?" in an SGI retrospective comment
| on an earlier thread,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39960660 which you might
| find of interest.
|
| Feedback from SGI insiders or pointers to HBR case studies
| welcome.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| From https://www.tech-pubs.net/wiki/IRIX_101 -
|
| > Why are machines that run IRIX expensive?
|
| > There are no new machines being produced, and high-end machines
| are in short supply. Less expensive machines can be had. We do
| not recommend using eBay to search, as the prices are usually
| extremely inflated.
|
| Less expensive machines can be had on the non-eBay used market,
| or have we hit the point where the cheapest way to have such a
| machine is dedicated emulation like
| https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard ?
| ThatGuyRaion wrote:
| If we can get an FPGA core of the Indy's XL/24 board and helper
| chips, you can buy a cheap pack of R5ks on alibaba last I
| checked and probably make a smol sgi board
| ur-whale wrote:
| I can't believe your site does not include the notorious SGI
| screwdriver, the mighty SGI #9980915
|
| http://industrialarithmetic.blogspot.com/2011/04/sgis-finest...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/fele3v...
| siev wrote:
| Nice job!
|
| Very Important: Are you gonna be adding an entry for the Japan-
| exclusive set-top box that had its own official port of DOOM done
| by Jonathan Blow? :p
| ThatGuyRaion wrote:
| Link?
| neilv wrote:
| Nice. Couple comments:
|
| * If you can find ways to collect and preserve copies of the
| software, that can be big value. Every version and variation of a
| title has sometimes been important after the fact. Maybe use
| archive.org for historical archiving of software with unclear
| licensing status, and link to it from your wiki, with your wiki
| providing the background text and organizing that isn't
| archive.org's strong suit. (I'm not talking about piracy, but
| just trying to ensure that any copy at all survives, which had
| been a real problem on some other platforms of this era. Also,
| it's easier to get a company to say that such-and-such software
| from a company three acquisitions ago is OK for people to run on
| vintage boxes and in emulators and museums, than to ask them to
| find and provide a working copy, which they usually cannot.)
|
| * You might want to capture provenance/copyright info for
| uploaded photos, like Wikipedia kinda does. Easier to capture it
| at upload/linking time, than to try to reconstruct it later.
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