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No kidding: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/12/17/sgi-workstations https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/12/17/sgi-workstation... > The Octane line’s

No kidding: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/12/17/sgi-workstations https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/12/17/sgi-workstation... > The Octane line’s entry-level product, which comes with a 225-MHz R10000 MIPS processor, 128MB of memory, a 4GB hard drive, and a 20-inch monitor, will fall to $17,995 from $19,995. Really makes the M1 Ultra look affordable.

usefulcat 5y ago
The Indy, which predated the Octane, started much lower ($5k according to Wikipedia, presumably in mid-nineties dollars), but yeah your point very much stands.
- twoodfin 5y ago
  The Indy, though, was notoriously underpowered. Very much the “glorified home computer” the GP described, albeit running MIPS. Still, sure did stand out in the MIT computer labs!
  - Epiphany21 5y ago
    Indys weren't truly that slow. The problem was the base models were memory constrained to the point where IRIX could barely boot. 16MB was not enough, and IRIX 5.x had memory leaks that made it even worse. An Indy with 96MB+ will run IRIX 6.5 pretty well.
    - usefulcat 5y ago
      That sounds right. I believe most or all developers at the place I worked had either 32 or 64 MB in their machines. At first (~1995) most were probably using IRIX 5.3, but by 96 or 97 I think most if not all had moved to 6.5. Whatever I had, I don't recall lack of memory ever being a problem. And the GUI was quite snappy.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        The GUI was fantastic. Minimal got out of your way as much as possible and used the hardware acceleration to great effect. IRIX 6.5 was rock solid, I used it as my main driver for years before switching to Linux, we also had some windows boxes floating around because we supported a windows binary but that and admin were the only things done on those, everything was either SGI or Linux. I was still using my SGI keyboard two years ago but it finally died.
    - bsder 5y ago
      I seem to remember a very classic rant about how bad Irix was back then but I can't seem to find it.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    SGI some places did a great job at giving good deals to computer labs. When I was at university in Oslo, there were rows and rows of Indy's on one side of the biggest undergrad computer lab, and then a bunch of Suns with multiple monochrome Tandberg terminals hooked up on the other. No big surprise that the Indy side always filled up first, and that "everyone" soon had XEarth and similar running as backgrounds on the Indys... Of course "everyone" loved SGI and were thoroughly unimpressed with Sun after a semester in those labs.
- don-code 5y ago
  There's a running joke about the Indy that it's the Indigo (its much-more-expensive brother) without the "go".
guyzero 5y ago
That's just over $31,000 in 2022 dollars. I don't think I can even imagine what kind of modern desktop you could build for that much money.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  https://zworkstations.com/configurations/3010617/ https://zworkstations.com/configurations/3010617/ 24x 4.5GHz cores, 96GB memory, 48TB NVMe storage, 2 giant GPUs, etc.
  - guyzero 5y ago
    That's wild, although it seems to be server parts in a workstation case. I guess none of Intel's "desktop" chips support a dual/quad CPU configuration though, so that's your only choice. Quad 8 TB NVMe drives is definitely one way to get to $30K of parts pretty quickly.
    - sbierwagen 5y ago
      Neither Intel or AMD support SMP with consumer chips. To go dual-processor with AMD you have to buy EPYC skus, which are several times more expensive than their threadripper core-count equivalents.
      - nullc 5y ago
        FWIW, EPYCs sell on ebay with $/core prices much closer to threadripper prices-- presumably that's closer to what AMD is selling them for to large companies after discounts. The MSRP on them is ... quite staggering though!
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  I'm not even sure you could build a $31,000 desktop computer even if you wanted to without resorting to some ridiculous "expensive for the sake of being expensive" parts. Even quad RTX 3090 Ti's would only set you back $8,000 if you got them at MSRP. EDIT: Just saw the other comment and I stand corrected.
api 5y ago
> Really makes the M1 Ultra look affordable. The amount of power you can buy today for under $1000 let alone under $10000 is insane compared to back then. The M1 Ultra is not that expensive compared to mid-range workstations or even high-end PCs of previous eras.
- paulmd 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't quite get the way people sometimes reminisce about the hardware costs of the past. We used to have consumer CPUs topping $1000 back when that was some serious money, and big-boy graphics workstations could easily run the tens or hundreds of thousands.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Non-toy computers were only available to the relatively wealthy for nearly a decade. The original Apple II was the equivalent of around $5000, which certainly wasn't a casual purchase for most people. If you look in back-issues of Byte the prices of early PCs with a usable spec are eye-watering, even before correcting for inflation. Prices didn't start dropping to more accessible levels until the 90s.
  - rodgerd 5y ago
    An Irix workstation is like buying a Countach. It's a thing you have because it's the thing that you always wanted.
- vidarh 5y ago
  I used to run an e-mail service with ~2m user accounts '99-'01. Our storage was an IBM ESS "Shark" stocked with 1.5TB of drives and two RS/6000 servers as the storage controllers. Add on web frontends and mail exchangers, and the entire system was slower and had less aggregate RAM and processing power, less (and slower) disk (well SSD in my laptop) than my current $1500 laptop.

usefulcat 5y ago

The Indy, which predated the Octane, started much lower ($5k according to Wikipedia, presumably in mid-nineties dollars), but yeah your point very much stands.

twoodfin 5y ago
The Indy, though, was notoriously underpowered. Very much the “glorified home computer” the GP described, albeit running MIPS. Still, sure did stand out in the MIT computer labs!
- Epiphany21 5y ago
  Indys weren't truly that slow. The problem was the base models were memory constrained to the point where IRIX could barely boot. 16MB was not enough, and IRIX 5.x had memory leaks that made it even worse. An Indy with 96MB+ will run IRIX 6.5 pretty well.
  - usefulcat 5y ago
    That sounds right. I believe most or all developers at the place I worked had either 32 or 64 MB in their machines. At first (~1995) most were probably using IRIX 5.3, but by 96 or 97 I think most if not all had moved to 6.5. Whatever I had, I don't recall lack of memory ever being a problem. And the GUI was quite snappy.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      The GUI was fantastic. Minimal got out of your way as much as possible and used the hardware acceleration to great effect. IRIX 6.5 was rock solid, I used it as my main driver for years before switching to Linux, we also had some windows boxes floating around because we supported a windows binary but that and admin were the only things done on those, everything was either SGI or Linux. I was still using my SGI keyboard two years ago but it finally died.
  - bsder 5y ago
    I seem to remember a very classic rant about how bad Irix was back then but I can't seem to find it.
- vidarh 5y ago
  SGI some places did a great job at giving good deals to computer labs. When I was at university in Oslo, there were rows and rows of Indy's on one side of the biggest undergrad computer lab, and then a bunch of Suns with multiple monochrome Tandberg terminals hooked up on the other. No big surprise that the Indy side always filled up first, and that "everyone" soon had XEarth and similar running as backgrounds on the Indys... Of course "everyone" loved SGI and were thoroughly unimpressed with Sun after a semester in those labs.
don-code 5y ago
There's a running joke about the Indy that it's the Indigo (its much-more-expensive brother) without the "go".

guyzero 5y ago

That's just over $31,000 in 2022 dollars. I don't think I can even imagine what kind of modern desktop you could build for that much money.

jeffbee 5y ago
https://zworkstations.com/configurations/3010617/ https://zworkstations.com/configurations/3010617/ 24x 4.5GHz cores, 96GB memory, 48TB NVMe storage, 2 giant GPUs, etc.
- guyzero 5y ago
  That's wild, although it seems to be server parts in a workstation case. I guess none of Intel's "desktop" chips support a dual/quad CPU configuration though, so that's your only choice. Quad 8 TB NVMe drives is definitely one way to get to $30K of parts pretty quickly.
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    Neither Intel or AMD support SMP with consumer chips. To go dual-processor with AMD you have to buy EPYC skus, which are several times more expensive than their threadripper core-count equivalents.
    - nullc 5y ago
      FWIW, EPYCs sell on ebay with $/core prices much closer to threadripper prices-- presumably that's closer to what AMD is selling them for to large companies after discounts. The MSRP on them is ... quite staggering though!
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
I'm not even sure you could build a $31,000 desktop computer even if you wanted to without resorting to some ridiculous "expensive for the sake of being expensive" parts. Even quad RTX 3090 Ti's would only set you back $8,000 if you got them at MSRP. EDIT: Just saw the other comment and I stand corrected.

api 5y ago

> Really makes the M1 Ultra look affordable. The amount of power you can buy today for under $1000 let alone under $10000 is insane compared to back then. The M1 Ultra is not that expensive compared to mid-range workstations or even high-end PCs of previous eras.

paulmd 5y ago
Yeah, I don't quite get the way people sometimes reminisce about the hardware costs of the past. We used to have consumer CPUs topping $1000 back when that was some serious money, and big-boy graphics workstations could easily run the tens or hundreds of thousands.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Non-toy computers were only available to the relatively wealthy for nearly a decade. The original Apple II was the equivalent of around $5000, which certainly wasn't a casual purchase for most people. If you look in back-issues of Byte the prices of early PCs with a usable spec are eye-watering, even before correcting for inflation. Prices didn't start dropping to more accessible levels until the 90s.
- rodgerd 5y ago
  An Irix workstation is like buying a Countach. It's a thing you have because it's the thing that you always wanted.
vidarh 5y ago
I used to run an e-mail service with ~2m user accounts '99-'01. Our storage was an IBM ESS "Shark" stocked with 1.5TB of drives and two RS/6000 servers as the storage controllers. Add on web frontends and mail exchangers, and the entire system was slower and had less aggregate RAM and processing power, less (and slower) disk (well SSD in my laptop) than my current $1500 laptop.