4 ms·

I remember when windows 95 came out, all everyone talked about was affording more ram. Even the normal people. Still with a little bit of effort they could have

I remember when windows 95 came out, all everyone talked about was affording more ram. Even the normal people. Still with a little bit of effort they could have made it usable in 8-12meg. I think. Then they had a second chance at the market with the SGI O2. Can you imagine walking into a best buy and seeing that next to windows95? Built in webcam, video recording, etc. It ran fine on 32-64 megs ram which in '96 was the norm. I should mention, that NeXT also had the technology to make things happen. And they made it happen, a few years later....

maxharris 16y ago
Sure, IRIX could run in 8-12 mb if you turn off X. But that means no graphics and no browser. I don't mean to be rude, but have you ever actually used an SGI? In 1996, the O2 started at about $6000, and listed for more: http://cgi.amazing.com/internet/faq-6.0.html http://cgi.amazing.com/internet/faq-6.0.html As for the Indy, see http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.tc.umn.edu/dols0011/sgi/index.html http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.tc.umn.edu/dols0011/... "At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, was the Windows NT 4.0 of Unices, magically able to, performance-wise, transform an R4000PC Indy with 16MB of RAM (the standard configuration) into a 386SX with a weird blue box. SGI realized this and quickly upped the box to 32MB, at considerable cost. (As you may recall, 16MB of parity 70ns RAM was hardly cheap in 1993-1995.) Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage." But not enough improvements in time to beat back the PC, of course. "The Indy packs a decent amount of power into a very small (16"x14"x3"), simple, and elegant package. The chassis is just three parts: The "tray," which is sheet metal; the power supply; and the skin, which is a one-piece plastic cover with a thin sheet of metal covering the bottom of it to meet FCC compliance. The steel tray occupies the entire depth of the Indy, but not the entire width; four inches or so of the left side belong to the power supply, which occupies the entire depth of the tray and is a separate box. The whole unit is, although well-built, very economical and, dare I say, cheap. Speaking as someone who has had an opened-up broken Indy sitting on his basement floor, this is not a machine that screams "I cost $10,000." It's obvious SGI made a darn nice profit off these buggers."
- spitfire 16y ago
  A good chunk of my career was based on SGI's until 2002ish. I started on an iris professional if that helps. I still smile when I think of SGI's c++ compiler - it had real error messages unlike gcc up until a few years ago. SGi hardware was priced high for two reasons 1) The market (government, industry) would bear the price and 2) small market size. Fix market size and the price can come down - leaving your indigo/indigo2/crimsons' for the govt/oil/entreatment industry. With proper application of brain juice, switching to IDE drives, etc you could have shaved and optimized enough to get an indy or O2 usable for the mass market. Add back the memory intensive things as time goes on. Then add in some small business file/email/etc server (challenge s) and you're ready to take on the business market.

maxharris 16y ago

Sure, IRIX could run in 8-12 mb if you turn off X. But that means no graphics and no browser. I don't mean to be rude, but have you ever actually used an SGI? In 1996, the O2 started at about $6000, and listed for more: http://cgi.amazing.com/internet/faq-6.0.html http://cgi.amazing.com/internet/faq-6.0.html As for the Indy, see http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.tc.umn.edu/dols0011/sgi/index.html http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.tc.umn.edu/dols0011/... "At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, was the Windows NT 4.0 of Unices, magically able to, performance-wise, transform an R4000PC Indy with 16MB of RAM (the standard configuration) into a 386SX with a weird blue box. SGI realized this and quickly upped the box to 32MB, at considerable cost. (As you may recall, 16MB of parity 70ns RAM was hardly cheap in 1993-1995.) Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage." But not enough improvements in time to beat back the PC, of course. "The Indy packs a decent amount of power into a very small (16"x14"x3"), simple, and elegant package. The chassis is just three parts: The "tray," which is sheet metal; the power supply; and the skin, which is a one-piece plastic cover with a thin sheet of metal covering the bottom of it to meet FCC compliance. The steel tray occupies the entire depth of the Indy, but not the entire width; four inches or so of the left side belong to the power supply, which occupies the entire depth of the tray and is a separate box. The whole unit is, although well-built, very economical and, dare I say, cheap. Speaking as someone who has had an opened-up broken Indy sitting on his basement floor, this is not a machine that screams "I cost $10,000." It's obvious SGI made a darn nice profit off these buggers."

spitfire 16y ago
A good chunk of my career was based on SGI's until 2002ish. I started on an iris professional if that helps. I still smile when I think of SGI's c++ compiler - it had real error messages unlike gcc up until a few years ago. SGi hardware was priced high for two reasons 1) The market (government, industry) would bear the price and 2) small market size. Fix market size and the price can come down - leaving your indigo/indigo2/crimsons' for the govt/oil/entreatment industry. With proper application of brain juice, switching to IDE drives, etc you could have shaved and optimized enough to get an indy or O2 usable for the mass market. Add back the memory intensive things as time goes on. Then add in some small business file/email/etc server (challenge s) and you're ready to take on the business market.