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The SGI O2 was one of the best looking workstations ever designed. I still have mine, gutted with a x86 Linux box inside but still.
by ajmarsh 10y ago
The SGI O2 was one of the best looking workstations ever designed. I still have mine, gutted with a x86 Linux box inside but still.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat's another thing good about them. They were stylish. Not many were back then. Another feature I liked was two motherboards. I didn't get to buy one but I figured you could theoretically get extra reliability out of it.
- bluedino 10y ago>> They were stylish. Not many were back then. The 90's were full of stylish cases. Maybe it's just nostalgia but there were so many cool looking computers back then. SGI did make them another level of cool. Purple computers! Even something like an Indy that was just going to sit in a web farm looked cool.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoMaybe I missed them but most of x86 market that I personally saw was dull beige or black boxes. The SunBlades, SGI, and Next Cubes were neat. What else I miss outside outfits doing custom boxes like Alienware?
- bluedino 10y agoThe BeBox, Macs (in particular the PM 9600, G3 towers), HP Kayak workstation is one of my all-time favorites...
- amyjess 10y agoI still haven't seen any modern-day cases that look nearly as beautiful as SGI's designs. Even simple desktops like the Indigo2 had style, and then you had oddball-looking beasts like the Tezro that really pushed the boundaries of what you can do with a computer case. I miss SGI. The real SGI, that is.
- ido 10y agoSome of the macs since the original imac aren't too bad either. Most modern computers are too cheap to be able to build them with high quality components, and the margins razor thin. Adjusted for inflation even high-end modern desktop PCs are 10x cheaper than low end Suns and SGIs of the 90s ($10k in '96 $s is >$15k in modern $s).
- pstuart 10y agoThe G5 PowerMac cases were quite stylish and nice to work with.
- Theodores 10y agoI have a personal Iris, an Indy, an Indigo2 and one of those useless PCs they brought out. Didn't get as far as having an Onyx 'Infinite Reality' at home, however, all of those boxes definitely had coolness that nothing else had during that era. The Susan Kare icons and Indigo Magic desktop with 'cpu-eater' desktop wallpaper was totally awesome, completing the look. Even the fonts were totally ahead of everything else. In my opinion the Google Pixel is the only contemporary machine that has design edge that is envy worthy. I don't have the 'ludicrous speed' edition (yet), I am slumming it with the 2013 version but still utterly delighted with my '4Gb ram' machine. The original SGI boxes didn't run any software that mere mortals used - no Photoshop, MS Word or anything else consumer grade. The Google Pixel is a bit like that too, allegedly you cannot run anything but a web browser on one. Mine runs a linux dev stack very nicely so, for me, I am still using 'winterm' style terminal windows with 'vi' much like back in the day with SGI boxes. With things that are cool they are either cool to those that understand these things or they are cool to a wider audience, e.g. non-technical folk. My Pixel does impress mere mortals with the screen, the sound, the keyboard, the trackpad and the 'chrome' lights on the lid. Nothing else presents such a rich audio-visual experience in the laptop form factor. In mini-tutorials and working meetings I find the Google Pixel helps with the task in hand whilst projecting cool, albeit at a fraction of the awesomeness of an SGI box back in the 90's.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoYou miss cool stuff like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuMSk_S2ARI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuMSk_S2ARI
- rbanffy 10y agoI still prefer the Frog Design Suns, the beige and purple line. But, of course, the SGIs had 90's written all over.
- AndyMcConachie 10y agoIt was the first UNIX box I had that booted directly into X. That, and the man pages were kept up to date and didn't suck. It set a standard for me that took a long time to match.
- anthk 10y ago> That, and the man pages were kept up to date and didn't suck. I think OpenBSD was released on the same date and they kept the man pages up to date, too. The sad state with documentation with any GNU/Linux distro beside GuixSD cos GNU Info, is alarming.
- agumonkey 10y agoI like to think about SGI designing the O2 on previous SGI workstations. Dogfoodng.
- sevensor 10y agoI thought the Octane was a pretty sweet looking machine, too. I remember thinking it looked like it was from the future.
- Florin_Andrei 10y agoThose suckers were incredibly heavy too. It felt like the chassis was made of cast iron or something.