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Very cool! Did others in the company appreciate the benefits of repairable hardware? Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. Was that price considered giving

by durst 6y ago

Very cool! Did others in the company appreciate the benefits of repairable hardware? Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. Was that price considered giving it away?

hedora 6y ago
First one’s free. Edit: in hindsight it was a terrible marketing strategy. It meant that 100% of new customers had budget left over to spend on risky whitebox machines. I have fond memories of an AMD Linux cluster that ran circles around a Sun workstation. The workstation cost 10x more than the entire cluster.
reaperducer 6y ago
$50,000 sounds like a lot of money For a server in the 90's, it sounds pretty cheap to me. Apple's Xserves started at $3,000, and I've read they were considered underpowered. Sun was a premium company for heavy lifting. The company I worked for at the time was into Silicon Graphics, and those machines were five figures a pop just for desktops.
- samstave 6y ago
  Dud, when I rebuilt Lucas Films into the presidio (I was one of the tech designers on that project) - they had so many SGI systems... they built Keg-arrators out of $150,000 machines in moving. One small note on SGI - the 02 had a "feature' that cost you ~$2500 extra for access to a particular port - can recall if it was USB or Serial or what not, but you had to pay for this port... But this port was just blocked by a plastic cover - EVERY machine had this port/ but they were covered by a plastic cover. The $FEE that you paid was to simply have SGI remove the plastic cover on top of the port. The 02 was an extremely over priced piece of shit and the only reason it existed was to have Softimage and Maya run on MIPS
  - PascLeRasc 6y ago
    Was it analog video? I worked with a guy who loved SGI systems and still had some back in 2016 and he said they made analog video an option, but it was the same A/V add-on card as analog audio so they just glued plastic caps over the video ports if you didn't opt for it.
    - samstave 6y ago
      Lucas was the inventor of "offline video editing" -- which became a spin-off company called Avid. Avid was later based in seattle - but it was based on tech that LucasFilm invented - as was CG rendering called "the death star" which Steve Jobs bought from George for $10,000,000 and turned it into pixar. George didnt think that CGI was going to be profitable, hence selling to Jobs. Source: on the Presidio design team, I designed a majority of their data center in that facility - and had designed a cable interconnect matrix with the design requirement that any given workstation in the four-building facility could be made a render node when the engineer was not at desk (so at night) Lots of crazy experiences from that -- 1. being asked why I couldnt provide power over fiber 2. Being asked if I could design a facility in Singapore because paying "us Prima donnas" was too expensive when they could pay asian animators far less for the same work 3. Having see them in-bed with Force 10 networks 4. Seeing all their equipment stolen from the parking garage after delivery but before installation into the data-center by some construction guy 5. Them turning down my initial datacenter design which made it look like the inside of the death star. Telling me they hated it. 6. Watching the power struggle as the then CFO took control of the empire as Lucas stepped away. 7. Watching the distaste of all the employees as Lucas sold for four billion dollars to disney, but his accomplished and skilled staff got basically nothing because they didnt own stock in the company they built for lucas. Yeah - fuck george lucas.
samstave 6y ago
>>*Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. * OMG do you want to hear war stories about SGI? Turning SGI machines into keg-or-atores at Lucasfilm when consolodatiting to the presidio when all these Octanes and others were at ILM in Marin? Yeah - many a machine was turned into a bar... Heck the team building exercises at FB were to "build a bar for your team..."
- durst 6y ago
  The closest I came to an SGI machine was an N64, so I would be interested in hearing the stories. What did consolidating the SGI boards get you? Didn't that cause thermal issues? Are Presidio and "the death star" you referenced above related to RenderMan? I've done research on hardware for image processing (https://aetherling.org/ https://aetherling.org/), so it's interesting to hear about these systems.

by durst 6y ago

Very cool! Did others in the company appreciate the benefits of repairable hardware? Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. Was that price considered giving it away?

hedora 6y ago

First one’s free. Edit: in hindsight it was a terrible marketing strategy. It meant that 100% of new customers had budget left over to spend on risky whitebox machines. I have fond memories of an AMD Linux cluster that ran circles around a Sun workstation. The workstation cost 10x more than the entire cluster.

reaperducer 6y ago

$50,000 sounds like a lot of money For a server in the 90's, it sounds pretty cheap to me. Apple's Xserves started at $3,000, and I've read they were considered underpowered. Sun was a premium company for heavy lifting. The company I worked for at the time was into Silicon Graphics, and those machines were five figures a pop just for desktops.

samstave 6y ago
Dud, when I rebuilt Lucas Films into the presidio (I was one of the tech designers on that project) - they had so many SGI systems... they built Keg-arrators out of $150,000 machines in moving. One small note on SGI - the 02 had a "feature' that cost you ~$2500 extra for access to a particular port - can recall if it was USB or Serial or what not, but you had to pay for this port... But this port was just blocked by a plastic cover - EVERY machine had this port/ but they were covered by a plastic cover. The $FEE that you paid was to simply have SGI remove the plastic cover on top of the port. The 02 was an extremely over priced piece of shit and the only reason it existed was to have Softimage and Maya run on MIPS
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  Was it analog video? I worked with a guy who loved SGI systems and still had some back in 2016 and he said they made analog video an option, but it was the same A/V add-on card as analog audio so they just glued plastic caps over the video ports if you didn't opt for it.
  - samstave 6y ago
    Lucas was the inventor of "offline video editing" -- which became a spin-off company called Avid. Avid was later based in seattle - but it was based on tech that LucasFilm invented - as was CG rendering called "the death star" which Steve Jobs bought from George for $10,000,000 and turned it into pixar. George didnt think that CGI was going to be profitable, hence selling to Jobs. Source: on the Presidio design team, I designed a majority of their data center in that facility - and had designed a cable interconnect matrix with the design requirement that any given workstation in the four-building facility could be made a render node when the engineer was not at desk (so at night) Lots of crazy experiences from that -- 1. being asked why I couldnt provide power over fiber 2. Being asked if I could design a facility in Singapore because paying "us Prima donnas" was too expensive when they could pay asian animators far less for the same work 3. Having see them in-bed with Force 10 networks 4. Seeing all their equipment stolen from the parking garage after delivery but before installation into the data-center by some construction guy 5. Them turning down my initial datacenter design which made it look like the inside of the death star. Telling me they hated it. 6. Watching the power struggle as the then CFO took control of the empire as Lucas stepped away. 7. Watching the distaste of all the employees as Lucas sold for four billion dollars to disney, but his accomplished and skilled staff got basically nothing because they didnt own stock in the company they built for lucas. Yeah - fuck george lucas.

samstave 6y ago

>>*Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. * OMG do you want to hear war stories about SGI? Turning SGI machines into keg-or-atores at Lucasfilm when consolodatiting to the presidio when all these Octanes and others were at ILM in Marin? Yeah - many a machine was turned into a bar... Heck the team building exercises at FB were to "build a bar for your team..."

durst 6y ago
The closest I came to an SGI machine was an N64, so I would be interested in hearing the stories. What did consolidating the SGI boards get you? Didn't that cause thermal issues? Are Presidio and "the death star" you referenced above related to RenderMan? I've done research on hardware for image processing (https://aetherling.org/ https://aetherling.org/), so it's interesting to hear about these systems.