6 ms·

wasn't it just a bad clone of irix? why the hype?

by gcb0 11y ago

iheartmemcache 11y ago
IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?) but it could render 3d protein fold simulations from PDB files circa 1995 with little difficulty compared to the other gear in his lab. I also remember IRIX being used heavily for CGI in major motion pictures. (I want to say Lightwave or Maya was originally SGI only, due to architectural limitations on every other platform.) AFAIK NeXT didn't even come close to putting out any hardware that came close to allowing that sort of rendering capabilities. Xerox PARC's platform is probably the closest analogue.[1] Basically all of our modern day GUI paradigms are based off of what they did in the late 70s. @pjmlp will jump in with more detail if he sees this. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintosh/ http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintos...
- bluedino 11y ago
  >> IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. >> I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly Every workstation vendor had their own UNIX back then. SGI built in what became OpenGL and had the graphics hardware to pair it with. Later on they added things like the XFS file system (think 9TB volumes in 1994), 64-bit MIPS support, and multi-CPU support. All which were key in allowing SGI to do the things they did with 3D.
  - arca_vorago 11y ago
    To this day I still have an irrational love for SGI systems. I've been keeping an eye out for a case to use in a modern build just because. SGI also did a lot of pushing of the industry in good directions imho.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      SGI is basically the company that shows amazing engineers cannot overcome psychotic management. From their Windows strategy to their spending, SGI is the pulled defeat from the jaws of victory company.
      - pklausler 11y ago
        I wonder whether it all went wrong when SGI bought Cray Research in '96 or if things were already sliding downhill by then.
        protomyth 11y ago
        I think in 1995 with the Windows NT strategy marked the end. They were sliding in 96 and had already sold patents to Microsoft by then.
        rvense 11y ago
        I think they were just torn between doubling down on their own RISC processors or moving with the times and going Intel. They ended up trying to do both, and that's never going to work.
    - saganus 11y ago
      Same here. And the colors! those purple shades, wow. I remember seeing my first Indigo machine and being utterly amazed at both the design of the computer, the big ass monitor, the graphical interface (my friend and I just stood there opening and closing the program groups since they had this very cool 3D effect... and of course we were younger so this was super rare for us). Amazing machines. I would love to get my hands on one of them.
      - buttershakes 11y ago
        They were great machines, the Indy, the O2, Octane, etc. At the time there was really nothing comparable from a graphics performance perspective. However, even the latest mips SGI machine the tezro gets absolutely spanked by a modern machine in every possible way. They still have a premium price tag, probably due to rarity and legacy software in a few industries, but have poor performance vs alternatives. I'm putting my hope on raptor engineering or another firm delivering a Power based system, the days of the great unix workstation providers are in the past.
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    I was only 12 or 13 then but I remember the discontinuity between an AS/400 setup vs SunOS 2.6 (does that sound right for about '98?). But yeah I distinctly remember fighting against the platforms with such frustration (though it helped me a lot in my career so I can't complain too much). Wow, I realized they had a bit of advantage over their competitors but I didn't know their engineers were of that caliber. I knew that SGI made STL, but I had totally forgotten that they standardized OGL as well. Multi-CPU support VAX/VMS style still takes the cake in my book but I remember XFS being absolutely incredible re: latency against ext2 on Linux (2.2?) for small files while running an image host in the early 2000s. Anyways, that makes a lot lot more sense now as to why it'd be the platform of choice. I wish I had a chance to grab that gear before it was decommissioned :( RIP SGI - fond memories.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  "I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?)" It had 64-bit processors, high-bandwidth NUMA links for CPU's/boards, plenty of RAM, interconnects from CPU's to graphics cards that removed obstacles to performance, often custom graphics cards, custom software interfaces, whole-program optimization, and ability to scale up to 256 CPU's and hundreds of gigs of RAM in one image. Compare original Final Fantasy movie to anything 3D animated from that time period to see what SGI Onyx machines could do. ;) Hell, it still looks good despite all the advances since then by gaming and rendering engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ That doesn't happen a lot. Quite a bit can be done in real-time on modern systems. A few things in trailer still look better to me than modern games. I recall the detail even included individual strands of hair's physics and rendering. Too bad the plot and acting sucked because it was first to look real enough to fool people passing through the living room. Scared the rural ones, too. Took 32 Onyx2 Machines fully loaded plus tons of custom software. For desktops, Bill Gates and SGI did this demo on a machine with two, 150-200Mhz processors plus their graphics cards: https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s I start there because the first trick will impress you if you recall what multimedia, graphics, or concurrency were like on Windows PC's in 1998.
gamache 11y ago
Not at all. Irix was a fairly standard System V-derived Unix that ran on Silicon Graphics hardware, which typically was specially built for high graphics performance. NeXTSTEP broke with Unix tradition in many ways, notably using Display PostScript rather than the X Window System for display, offering Objective-C rather than vanilla C as the primary systems language, and attempting to provide a friendly WIMP interface as the primary mode of usage rather than the somewhat primitive windowmanagers in use on Unixes at the time. The NeXT hardware, in contrast, emphasized multimedia features (like CD audio, megapixel display, and desktop publishing) over graphics rendering performance.
- dalke 11y ago
  IRIX UI displays were based on Display PostScript, before SGI switched to X.
  - gamache 11y ago
    Huh, I did not know that! You're right, looks like DPS and X got merged in during IRIX 4.x.
    - mrpippy 11y ago
      SGI's X server (Xsgi) continued to support the DPS X extension up through 6.5.22. It was removed after that, either for licensing or support reasons depending on which rumors you believe. Some of the Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator) used DPS.
    - dalke 11y ago
      I still remember how neat it was to type PostScript into a console window and see the result appear on the root window.
- kps 11y ago
  Sun's NeWS previously used Postscript extended with an event system. Of course that meant a heavyweight display client running arbitrary code in an interpreted Turing-complete language communicating with application backends over a network, and something that ridiculous could never catch on.

wasn't it just a bad clone of irix? why the hype?

by gcb0 11y ago

wasn't it just a bad clone of irix? why the hype?

IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?) but it could render 3d protein fold simulations from PDB files circa 1995 with little difficulty compared to the other gear in his lab. I also remember IRIX being used heavily for CGI in major motion pictures. (I want to say Lightwave or Maya was originally SGI only, due to architectural limitations on every other platform.) AFAIK NeXT didn't even come close to putting out any hardware that came close to allowing that sort of rendering capabilities. Xerox PARC's platform is probably the closest analogue.[1] Basically all of our modern day GUI paradigms are based off of what they did in the late 70s. @pjmlp will jump in with more detail if he sees this. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintosh/ http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintos...

bluedino 11y ago
>> IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. >> I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly Every workstation vendor had their own UNIX back then. SGI built in what became OpenGL and had the graphics hardware to pair it with. Later on they added things like the XFS file system (think 9TB volumes in 1994), 64-bit MIPS support, and multi-CPU support. All which were key in allowing SGI to do the things they did with 3D.
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  To this day I still have an irrational love for SGI systems. I've been keeping an eye out for a case to use in a modern build just because. SGI also did a lot of pushing of the industry in good directions imho.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    SGI is basically the company that shows amazing engineers cannot overcome psychotic management. From their Windows strategy to their spending, SGI is the pulled defeat from the jaws of victory company.
    - pklausler 11y ago
      I wonder whether it all went wrong when SGI bought Cray Research in '96 or if things were already sliding downhill by then.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        I think in 1995 with the Windows NT strategy marked the end. They were sliding in 96 and had already sold patents to Microsoft by then.
      - rvense 11y ago
        I think they were just torn between doubling down on their own RISC processors or moving with the times and going Intel. They ended up trying to do both, and that's never going to work.
  - saganus 11y ago
    Same here. And the colors! those purple shades, wow. I remember seeing my first Indigo machine and being utterly amazed at both the design of the computer, the big ass monitor, the graphical interface (my friend and I just stood there opening and closing the program groups since they had this very cool 3D effect... and of course we were younger so this was super rare for us). Amazing machines. I would love to get my hands on one of them.
    - buttershakes 11y ago
      They were great machines, the Indy, the O2, Octane, etc. At the time there was really nothing comparable from a graphics performance perspective. However, even the latest mips SGI machine the tezro gets absolutely spanked by a modern machine in every possible way. They still have a premium price tag, probably due to rarity and legacy software in a few industries, but have poor performance vs alternatives. I'm putting my hope on raptor engineering or another firm delivering a Power based system, the days of the great unix workstation providers are in the past.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  I was only 12 or 13 then but I remember the discontinuity between an AS/400 setup vs SunOS 2.6 (does that sound right for about '98?). But yeah I distinctly remember fighting against the platforms with such frustration (though it helped me a lot in my career so I can't complain too much). Wow, I realized they had a bit of advantage over their competitors but I didn't know their engineers were of that caliber. I knew that SGI made STL, but I had totally forgotten that they standardized OGL as well. Multi-CPU support VAX/VMS style still takes the cake in my book but I remember XFS being absolutely incredible re: latency against ext2 on Linux (2.2?) for small files while running an image host in the early 2000s. Anyways, that makes a lot lot more sense now as to why it'd be the platform of choice. I wish I had a chance to grab that gear before it was decommissioned :( RIP SGI - fond memories.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
"I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?)" It had 64-bit processors, high-bandwidth NUMA links for CPU's/boards, plenty of RAM, interconnects from CPU's to graphics cards that removed obstacles to performance, often custom graphics cards, custom software interfaces, whole-program optimization, and ability to scale up to 256 CPU's and hundreds of gigs of RAM in one image. Compare original Final Fantasy movie to anything 3D animated from that time period to see what SGI Onyx machines could do. ;) Hell, it still looks good despite all the advances since then by gaming and rendering engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ That doesn't happen a lot. Quite a bit can be done in real-time on modern systems. A few things in trailer still look better to me than modern games. I recall the detail even included individual strands of hair's physics and rendering. Too bad the plot and acting sucked because it was first to look real enough to fool people passing through the living room. Scared the rural ones, too. Took 32 Onyx2 Machines fully loaded plus tons of custom software. For desktops, Bill Gates and SGI did this demo on a machine with two, 150-200Mhz processors plus their graphics cards: https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s I start there because the first trick will impress you if you recall what multimedia, graphics, or concurrency were like on Windows PC's in 1998.

gamache 11y ago

Not at all. Irix was a fairly standard System V-derived Unix that ran on Silicon Graphics hardware, which typically was specially built for high graphics performance. NeXTSTEP broke with Unix tradition in many ways, notably using Display PostScript rather than the X Window System for display, offering Objective-C rather than vanilla C as the primary systems language, and attempting to provide a friendly WIMP interface as the primary mode of usage rather than the somewhat primitive windowmanagers in use on Unixes at the time. The NeXT hardware, in contrast, emphasized multimedia features (like CD audio, megapixel display, and desktop publishing) over graphics rendering performance.

dalke 11y ago
IRIX UI displays were based on Display PostScript, before SGI switched to X.
- gamache 11y ago
  Huh, I did not know that! You're right, looks like DPS and X got merged in during IRIX 4.x.
  - mrpippy 11y ago
    SGI's X server (Xsgi) continued to support the DPS X extension up through 6.5.22. It was removed after that, either for licensing or support reasons depending on which rumors you believe. Some of the Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator) used DPS.
  - dalke 11y ago
    I still remember how neat it was to type PostScript into a console window and see the result appear on the root window.
kps 11y ago
Sun's NeWS previously used Postscript extended with an event system. Of course that meant a heavyweight display client running arbitrary code in an interpreted Turing-complete language communicating with application backends over a network, and something that ridiculous could never catch on.