5 ms·

Can someone please explain what are the main hypothetical advantages of this desktop environment? Even the article itself does a poor job of explaining this, it

Can someone please explain what are the main hypothetical advantages of this desktop environment? Even the article itself does a poor job of explaining this, it seems to assume that the reader already knows what IRIX/whatever is, and why did (do?) people use it over other environments?

rbanffy 6y ago
You can check https://maxxinteractive.com/ https://maxxinteractive.com/ for more information.
- xvector 6y ago
  It doesn’t really help. What is SGI? What makes MaXX better than other desktops today? The page assumes too much background and doesn’t really do anything to convince a new reader. That said the desktop looks amazing! Love the theme.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Maybe it's intended for people who used Silicon Graphics IRIX workstations in the past and liked the streamlined desktop experience.
    - tomxor 6y ago
      Neither myself or xvector have used IRIX, so descriptors like "streamlined" are not concrete enough. I feel like my i3wm setup is extremely streamlined for instance.
      - pantalaimon 6y ago
        I think nostalgia is a big factor here. With this you don’t have to lug around an old workstation to experience it.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        SGI is like Amiga, NeXT, Atari and plenty of other systems, there is only so much that one can put into words, without actually having used one, the reader will never get the whole point of it.
        tomxor 6y ago
        I used to have an Atari ST, i love that little green crappy desktop for irrational reasons, but I wouldn't argue it's more streamlined than my modern setup. That's why I keep Hatari installed... but I don't try to use it as my development environment.
        reaperducer 6y ago
        I used to have an Atari ST, i love that little green crappy desktop for irrational reasons Didn't the ST run GEM? Now that I think about it, I believe GEM could run on a bunch of different computers. I'll have to see if I can find a version to install on one of my banger laptops.
        hakfoo 6y ago
        You can definitely put together a GEM on top of FreeDOS stack. I got some janky 486 laptops for note-taking in university and swapped between that and OS/2 3.0 with its rudimentary pack-in wordprocessor. PC/GEOS would have been even better, but was not readily available at thwe time, as I think it was still a commercial product targeted towards schools using hand-me-down PCs.
        tomxor 6y ago
        Yes it did, and yes it could, although I never saw it run on anything else - or if I did i didn't recognise it... AFAIU the atari version was a little more capable and a bit more fun than the other versions, due to Apple suing DRI and crippling later versions to comply with Apple's demands, yet somehow Atari was excluded from those demands since they bought rights to the source code for further development so continued with the original concept.
      - Theodores 6y ago
        IRIX 4Dwm was like the Rolls Royce of desktops. It didn't get in the way of what you were trying to do. This was in a time when you only ran one application on your SGI machine, e.g. 3D modelling. Compared to Windows, Sun and other desktops it was just nicer to use. The responsiveness, the cool fonts and the 3D bits with no anti-virus pop ups or other nonsense made it a joy to use. The icons were Susan Kate originals done in vectors before SVG was a thing. Things like the CPU performance monitor were a joy to see and haven't been improved on. Same goes for the screen savers, not that we have them now. There was nothing clunky about the magical desktop and normally your applications were tools that cost tens of thousands. Mere mortals thought they were seeing the future and what a brilliant future that was. The web was going to be VRML 3D in those days but we ended up with 2D bloat. The tools you have shape how you think and SGI just made your thinking creative and imaginative. Everyone else was on Windows which had great apps like MS Office but an SGI machine had none of those civilian programs. IMHO Ubuntu has a desktop that falls short of what SGI had even though it is an environment that doesn't distract in the way that Windows does. How I see it is that you have consumer operating systems such as Windows, ChromeOS and OSX and you have professional operating systems such as what classic UNIX machines had. Linux desktops are in this professional mould.
        abrowne 6y ago
        > The icons were Susan Kate originals done in vectors before SVG was a thing. Susan Kare?
        aspenmayer 6y ago
        Seems like it was Susan Kare. Probably an autocorrect fail, as I had the exact same thing happen to me when I typed her name just now. More information about her work on SGI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527488
        abrowne 6y ago
        Thanks for that link. I couldn't find anything searching her name plus "Silicon Graphics", "SGI" or "IRIX".
    - richardjdare 6y ago
      I bet a lot of the interest is from people like me who grew up with home computers in the 80s and 90s. In the old days Silicon Graphics had this almost mythical reputation. As a kid with a home computer I used to daydream about one day getting my hands on an SGI, what kind of games I'd be able to make on it. The computer scene was more fragmented back then. Graphics Workstations sat apart from home computers, and the ordinary Amiga or C64 user would only read about them in magazines or see them featured in TV shows about movie special effects. If you liked computer graphics, these TV shows and articles were like glimpses ten years into the future. Because of this, SGI became a byword for "amazingly cool computer with powerful, exotic graphics hardware that I will never get my hands on" Many of us hoped that one day we'd be playing video games on an SGI home computer or vr deck.
      - owl57 6y ago
        In Pelevin's Generation «П», published in 1999, all the politicians and other celebrities are not real people, but rendered for TV on SGI computers, complete with some comments on events that require more computing power to render and thus "happen" rarely or only in richer countries. No other brand (even an entirely made-up one) would look as natural in this myth.
    - anthk 6y ago
      Most SGI people used KDE's kicker on 4DWM, or IceWM ditching 4DWM altogether. Heck, one SGI user wrote JWM for SGI's and them it became a neew WM into mainlinux Linux and BSD's.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    What is SGI? Seeing this question asked makes me sad. If you are browsing this on Linux then you're probably using code descended from Netscape which was developed by a guy called Zawinski on an SGI Indy. Or if you have seen a movie, then all the special effects are descended from work done on SGI machines. If you have fuel in your car, the oil field was probably originally found after running seismic analysis on an SGI. They were famous for their movie work but Oil & Gas was actually a far bigger market for them. If you have flown anywhere, the pilot was trained on a simulator descended from technology developed by SGI. If you program C++ then STL comes from SGI. As does the XFS filesystem. If you have seen a weather forecast on TV, that probably was done on a Cray, who for a while were owned by SGI and who developed a lot of their tech. Many TV stations used SGIs to render the forecast on the green screen behind the presenter too. If you have played Nintendo, the MIPS processor in it was developed by SGI. If you play games on PC, OpenGL was developed by SGI. They were once one of the most influential computing companies in the world. Now they are merely a legend, and a fading one at that :-(
    - ajmarsh 6y ago
      Most of the early image guided surgery systems were powered by SGI's as well.
      - nix23 6y ago
        And dont forget Jurassic park: http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html
    - nix23 6y ago
      >Seeing this question asked makes me sad. Me too, Irix, XFS (The Redhat std FS) and so much more was made by SGI.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      > If you program C++ then STL comes from SGI Been a while and I had nearly forgotten! It used to be that when you googled an STL container, SGI documentation came up first. This was occasionally annoying as there were a few things that were slightly different from what was standardized. If memory serves, they had a better hash table before the standard did...
  - pkphilip 6y ago
    SGI is Silicon Graphics - they were the pioneers in 3D animation especially for the movies, research etc. Jurassic Park was entirely rendered in SGI workstations. These workstations were incredibly powerful and extremely expensive (think > $250,000 for the higher end gear in the 1990s) but pretty amazing. Also, for the time it had very advanced user interfaces. SGI Irix was the name of the OS which ran on these machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA
  - trimbo 6y ago
    It's a unix system, demoed in Jurassic Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U
morganvachon 6y ago
As others have said, it's mostly nostalgia, and perhaps an effort to go back to what was a comfortable and sensible working environment from 25-30 years ago. It's the same reason the Haiku operating system is being developed: Nostalgia for an operating system that was far more advanced and beautiful than its contemporaries in the late 90s and early 2000s.

rbanffy 6y ago

You can check https://maxxinteractive.com/ https://maxxinteractive.com/ for more information.

xvector 6y ago
It doesn’t really help. What is SGI? What makes MaXX better than other desktops today? The page assumes too much background and doesn’t really do anything to convince a new reader. That said the desktop looks amazing! Love the theme.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Maybe it's intended for people who used Silicon Graphics IRIX workstations in the past and liked the streamlined desktop experience.
  - tomxor 6y ago
    Neither myself or xvector have used IRIX, so descriptors like "streamlined" are not concrete enough. I feel like my i3wm setup is extremely streamlined for instance.
    - pantalaimon 6y ago
      I think nostalgia is a big factor here. With this you don’t have to lug around an old workstation to experience it.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      SGI is like Amiga, NeXT, Atari and plenty of other systems, there is only so much that one can put into words, without actually having used one, the reader will never get the whole point of it.
      - tomxor 6y ago
        I used to have an Atari ST, i love that little green crappy desktop for irrational reasons, but I wouldn't argue it's more streamlined than my modern setup. That's why I keep Hatari installed... but I don't try to use it as my development environment.
        reaperducer 6y ago
        I used to have an Atari ST, i love that little green crappy desktop for irrational reasons Didn't the ST run GEM? Now that I think about it, I believe GEM could run on a bunch of different computers. I'll have to see if I can find a version to install on one of my banger laptops.
        hakfoo 6y ago
        You can definitely put together a GEM on top of FreeDOS stack. I got some janky 486 laptops for note-taking in university and swapped between that and OS/2 3.0 with its rudimentary pack-in wordprocessor. PC/GEOS would have been even better, but was not readily available at thwe time, as I think it was still a commercial product targeted towards schools using hand-me-down PCs.
        tomxor 6y ago
        Yes it did, and yes it could, although I never saw it run on anything else - or if I did i didn't recognise it... AFAIU the atari version was a little more capable and a bit more fun than the other versions, due to Apple suing DRI and crippling later versions to comply with Apple's demands, yet somehow Atari was excluded from those demands since they bought rights to the source code for further development so continued with the original concept.
    - Theodores 6y ago
      IRIX 4Dwm was like the Rolls Royce of desktops. It didn't get in the way of what you were trying to do. This was in a time when you only ran one application on your SGI machine, e.g. 3D modelling. Compared to Windows, Sun and other desktops it was just nicer to use. The responsiveness, the cool fonts and the 3D bits with no anti-virus pop ups or other nonsense made it a joy to use. The icons were Susan Kate originals done in vectors before SVG was a thing. Things like the CPU performance monitor were a joy to see and haven't been improved on. Same goes for the screen savers, not that we have them now. There was nothing clunky about the magical desktop and normally your applications were tools that cost tens of thousands. Mere mortals thought they were seeing the future and what a brilliant future that was. The web was going to be VRML 3D in those days but we ended up with 2D bloat. The tools you have shape how you think and SGI just made your thinking creative and imaginative. Everyone else was on Windows which had great apps like MS Office but an SGI machine had none of those civilian programs. IMHO Ubuntu has a desktop that falls short of what SGI had even though it is an environment that doesn't distract in the way that Windows does. How I see it is that you have consumer operating systems such as Windows, ChromeOS and OSX and you have professional operating systems such as what classic UNIX machines had. Linux desktops are in this professional mould.
      - abrowne 6y ago
        > The icons were Susan Kate originals done in vectors before SVG was a thing. Susan Kare?
        aspenmayer 6y ago
        Seems like it was Susan Kare. Probably an autocorrect fail, as I had the exact same thing happen to me when I typed her name just now. More information about her work on SGI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527488
        abrowne 6y ago
        Thanks for that link. I couldn't find anything searching her name plus "Silicon Graphics", "SGI" or "IRIX".
  - richardjdare 6y ago
    I bet a lot of the interest is from people like me who grew up with home computers in the 80s and 90s. In the old days Silicon Graphics had this almost mythical reputation. As a kid with a home computer I used to daydream about one day getting my hands on an SGI, what kind of games I'd be able to make on it. The computer scene was more fragmented back then. Graphics Workstations sat apart from home computers, and the ordinary Amiga or C64 user would only read about them in magazines or see them featured in TV shows about movie special effects. If you liked computer graphics, these TV shows and articles were like glimpses ten years into the future. Because of this, SGI became a byword for "amazingly cool computer with powerful, exotic graphics hardware that I will never get my hands on" Many of us hoped that one day we'd be playing video games on an SGI home computer or vr deck.
    - owl57 6y ago
      In Pelevin's Generation «П», published in 1999, all the politicians and other celebrities are not real people, but rendered for TV on SGI computers, complete with some comments on events that require more computing power to render and thus "happen" rarely or only in richer countries. No other brand (even an entirely made-up one) would look as natural in this myth.
  - anthk 6y ago
    Most SGI people used KDE's kicker on 4DWM, or IceWM ditching 4DWM altogether. Heck, one SGI user wrote JWM for SGI's and them it became a neew WM into mainlinux Linux and BSD's.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  What is SGI? Seeing this question asked makes me sad. If you are browsing this on Linux then you're probably using code descended from Netscape which was developed by a guy called Zawinski on an SGI Indy. Or if you have seen a movie, then all the special effects are descended from work done on SGI machines. If you have fuel in your car, the oil field was probably originally found after running seismic analysis on an SGI. They were famous for their movie work but Oil & Gas was actually a far bigger market for them. If you have flown anywhere, the pilot was trained on a simulator descended from technology developed by SGI. If you program C++ then STL comes from SGI. As does the XFS filesystem. If you have seen a weather forecast on TV, that probably was done on a Cray, who for a while were owned by SGI and who developed a lot of their tech. Many TV stations used SGIs to render the forecast on the green screen behind the presenter too. If you have played Nintendo, the MIPS processor in it was developed by SGI. If you play games on PC, OpenGL was developed by SGI. They were once one of the most influential computing companies in the world. Now they are merely a legend, and a fading one at that :-(
  - ajmarsh 6y ago
    Most of the early image guided surgery systems were powered by SGI's as well.
    - nix23 6y ago
      And dont forget Jurassic park: http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html
  - nix23 6y ago
    >Seeing this question asked makes me sad. Me too, Irix, XFS (The Redhat std FS) and so much more was made by SGI.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    > If you program C++ then STL comes from SGI Been a while and I had nearly forgotten! It used to be that when you googled an STL container, SGI documentation came up first. This was occasionally annoying as there were a few things that were slightly different from what was standardized. If memory serves, they had a better hash table before the standard did...
- pkphilip 6y ago
  SGI is Silicon Graphics - they were the pioneers in 3D animation especially for the movies, research etc. Jurassic Park was entirely rendered in SGI workstations. These workstations were incredibly powerful and extremely expensive (think > $250,000 for the higher end gear in the 1990s) but pretty amazing. Also, for the time it had very advanced user interfaces. SGI Irix was the name of the OS which ran on these machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA
- trimbo 6y ago
  It's a unix system, demoed in Jurassic Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U

morganvachon 6y ago

As others have said, it's mostly nostalgia, and perhaps an effort to go back to what was a comfortable and sensible working environment from 25-30 years ago. It's the same reason the Haiku operating system is being developed: Nostalgia for an operating system that was far more advanced and beautiful than its contemporaries in the late 90s and early 2000s.