25 ms·

The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996

768 points by marcobambini 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Ah yes, good ol' SGI, it always brings a smile to my face reading these old war stories. I wish we could get some insight on the development of the first successful 3D game on PC, Quake by I'd software as there's a famous picture of John Carmack sitting in front of some SGI workstation with a monitor with a resolution ox 1920*1080( in 1995!) Also, SGI powered most VFX Studios of that era, so many great movies went through those machines before ending up on the big screen. It's insane how quickly 3dfx, Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely obsolete within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a blast. But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or black square boxes. [1] https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc6167be68994602a2be1f4153f81d5c3effa2 https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc61...
- nebula8804 5y ago
  Love those designs as the colors are now a direct representation of the 90s.
- walrus01 5y ago
  as I recall the SGI monitors were actually the pinnacle of Sony Trinitron CRT tech, rebadged, and connected using a 13W3 analog video link. Similar to the very high end Sun at the time. As neither SGI or Sun actually made CRTs, they went with the state of the art from the world's top CRT maker. Might have been some mitsubishi diamondtron in there too. In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display Nope, it was definitely 16:9, but I was mistaken, it was an Intergraph[1], not SGI like I originally thought, but still connected to an SGI workstation. Just look at this beast[1]. Also, the monitor is in the photo as well :) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/gxvm99/legendary_intergraph_interview_28hd96_all_we_know/ https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/gxvm99/legendary...
    - walrus01 5y ago
      I can't even imagine what that might have cost, it was probably sold for high-end CAD and similar...
      - dclowd9901 5y ago
        Sounds like it. A link in that thread points to someone stumbling upon a trove of six of them, owned by an avionics company.
  - midnightclubbed 5y ago
    The SGI monitors were 4:3 but I don't recall the resolution. I do recall that they were beasts, weight of a small elephant and a not dissimilar size - you needed to pull your desk away from the wall to get any kind of distance to the screen. Over time their timings would drift and you could never get the entire screen completely sharp.
    - cfn 5y ago
      And there was a button you could press to "de-magnetize" the screen which made this awesome noise!
      - lostcolony 5y ago
        Degaussing. Most(all?) CRT monitors could do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjO2vVaxIWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjO2vVaxIWM
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Just curious what are the state of arts graphic workstations nowadays? Mac pro?
  - walrus01 5y ago
    really, really beefy dual socket xeon probably, or amd epyc, with 2TB+ RAM
    - Certified 5y ago
      Surprisingly, because most CAD and computer graphics programs are still largely not optimized for multi-threaded processors, the fastest workstations are typically using whatever processor tops the single core compute performance category, not the multicore. They are then paired with as much ram as the chipset supports. Also, when you are talking about pro graphics cards like Radeon Pro and the RTX A (formerly called quadro) lines, it only pays to upgrade to the next gen graphics card once your software vendor has had a year or two to integrate with a new hardware gen's capabilities. The pro gfx card market (at least when it pertains to OpenGL performance) is one area that will actually punish you for being too early an adopter, which is disappointing when cards go for several thousands of dollars new. The whole area of CG software has been stagnating for 5 years while OpenGL driver improvements have fallen out of favor for more bare metal processing approaches that are only now getting to feature parody and developer adoption like vulkan. Hopefully the next few years brings a positive trend in CG price to performance again as these new architectures actually start shipping in CG software products. As someone who works daily in CAD, the performance stagnation over the last 5-10 years has been depressing to say the least.
      - blevin 5y ago
        Feature parody is such a good turn of phrase.
      - markus_zhang 5y ago
        Thanks. This is totally new to me. I guess it's the same pic for professional level designers or game designers who basically work in a CAD like environment? For example the people who design levels and scripts for games such as Skyrim.
- jl6 5y ago
  I recall CRT monitors were capable of some quite high resolutions (often with a compromise to refresh rate), and it took a while for LCD panels to overtake them.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    I read that CRTs are still better in some respects
    - adamredwoods 5y ago
      Better at making my arm hairs stick up.
      - parenthesis 5y ago
        Thanks for reminding me, that as a child I used to love touching the TV screen for the static.
    - ridgered4 5y ago
      Input latency, flexibility of native resolution (they don't really have one). It's been awhile since I've looked at them side by side, but I think they're still better on black levels. I suspect color reproduction has caught up though. It's not surprising they fell out of favor though. Once the ghosting stopped being absolutely horrendous the LCD is just superior for office work. Uses less power, saves tons of desk space (and due to less weight, doesn't need a strong desk) and no flickering means a cheapo LCD is probably easier on the eyes than a cheapo CRT. I bet the CRT wwould still be used more often if the supply chain to make them didn't fall apart when the demand disappeared.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      For giving you cancer! When Sony first brought out their OLED reference monitors to the market, they had a demo at NAB to demonstrate the various screen types. All of the monitors were the equivalent reference version of that series: CRT, LCD, OLED. It was an interesting demo as they had the same feed going to each monitor. When showing how each monitor could display black, the OLED looked like it was off, the LCD was just a faint shade of gray, while the CRT was much much more noticeably not black from its glowing screen. I started to think to myself how they might be pushing the brightness on the CRT to make it look bad against the others. Right as I was thinking that to myself, the narrator said something to address this thought and then displayed bars. All 3 monitors were correctly adjusted. A gamed CRT with brightness adjusted would have been obvious at this point to those knowing how the test pattern is meant to look. The only thing I'd suggest that a CRT looks better is on true interlaced content.
- bluedino 5y ago
  It was an Intergraph monitor, connected to an Integraph workstation. Carmack didn't use SGI's for development but they did use their servers for level processing
- pengaru 5y ago
  > It's insane how quickly Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely obsolete within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a blast. Let's at least give some credit to 3dfx Interactive for PCs dethroning the 3D giants. There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a Voodoo card.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Pretty much. With the advent of semi fabs like TSMC, STM, etc. making their processes more accessible to smaller fabless companies, 3dfx, PowerVR, ATI, Nvidia and other startups in the 3D space back then, realized they can replace all those expensive discrete RISC chips SGI was using for their massive 'reality engine' PCBs, and instead design a cheaper and more efficient custom ASIC from the ground up that does nearly the same things SGI's reality engine was doing (triangle rendering and texture mapping was enough for a PC 3D accelerator back then), but at 1/100th of the price, and sell it to consumers. Fast forward, and we all know how the story played out and where the industry is today. >There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a Voodoo card. Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then, plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was wild as hell.[1] Even the box-art on their GPU boxes was the most memorable of any HW of that era. Anyone remember those eye glaring down on you from the store shelves?[2] I feel like this is now a lost art. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I [2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkiRZhLW0AQzR7g.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkiRZhLW0AQzR7g.jpg
    - olivertaylor 5y ago
      > Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then, plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was wild as hell.[1] Haha. Amazing commercials. I don’t remember those at all, but they’re 100% on brand for the times.
    - justsomehnguy 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
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- agumonkey 5y ago
  I'm still stumped by nvidia rise and how gaming propelled them into HPC/Supercomputing. Who knew playing video games who amplify research that much ?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    every single teenager whose parental units asked where gaming skills would come into use later in life as an adult. at least the were hoping for something like that.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      I bet zero 90s teenager said "mooom, how do you expect to cure cancer if you stop me from buying nv chips ?? how ?"
      - dylan604 5y ago
        I bet I can stack boxes in a truck better than any pre-Tetris playing person before me!
    - anthk 5y ago
      Unix was created to play SpaceWar, and now you have Linux, OSX and BSD's based on it.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        And here I thought it was created to control the phone system.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        Wasn’t it for editing texts?
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    Simple. Rendering 3D graphics for games and the supercomputing used by AI/ML/research both need the same thing: Embarrassingly parallel math calculations with little or no branching in the code. For example, a feed-forward neural network is just a whole lot of multiplication and addition. Transforming a 3D vertex in space to a 2D screen coordinate is matrix multiplication, which is just a whole lot of multiplication and addition. If you've already designed silicon to perform those operations in a single clock cycle, making it do HPC/SC rather than gaming isn't that big of a switch.
- deleted 5y ago
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- MisterTea 5y ago
  > But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or black square boxes. This is what I miss most about the 90's and proprietary computer vendors: the exotic fun looking cases they had vs boring beige Mac and PC cases. I have an SGI 230 which was a last ditch effort to stay relevant via offering a regular x86 machine in an ATX SGI case. Unfortunately SGI ditched the snazzy cube logo sy then so it only has the lame fisher price sgi logo stenciled on it. It now houses a 12 core threadripper running Void Musl. Before that workstation, the 320 and 540 used Intel P3/Xeon chips on proprietary motherboards, 3D GPU/chip-set and even proprietary ram modules. Only ran nt4 and was a miserable failure of a machine.
  - aftbit 5y ago
    Why Void? And why Void musl?
    - MisterTea 5y ago
      It works for what I need and I like the BSD influence. Musl explores a cleaner c library. I run glibc stuff like Steam in containers and I run an AMD GPU. I don't have any direct need for systemd so its interesting to try alternatives.
- samstave 5y ago
  Fun fact, the O2 had an 'optional' expansion port that was an additional ~$1,000 or so... but the thing is, ALL the O2s had this port - it was that if you paid for it, they popped the plastic cover off the case to reveal the port...
  - p_l 5y ago
    Which expansion port are you talking about?
    - samstave 5y ago
      I cant recall what the port was... A serial port? I cant recall - but just that it was on all O2s and it was just knocking out the plastic cover to get access to it.
      - spitfire 5y ago
        One of the video ports. I think digital video port. The base model supported audio and "moose cam" (A webcam, in 1996!). If you paid extra you got video.
        p_l 5y ago
        There were two video options you could buy, with analog and digital versions, plus there were special parts to provide alternative options for display outs (by default it had sgi-style 13W3 only)
        bri3d 5y ago
        Oh, this was the SDI hack, but it needed a separate port expander - it was more involved than just removing a plate. You could buy the base AV1 "analog" video I/O card and then plug an SDI expansion breakout board (I think the Miranda VIVO was the most popular) into the webcam port, instead of buying the much more expensive AV2 "digital" video I/O card.
  - bri3d 5y ago
    I'm not so sure about this, I've owned a lot of O2s. The only blocking plates on the rear cover of an O2 usually cover the spot where the Flat Panel Adapter or Dual Monitor board goes, and it's not installed by default, or the spot where a PCI card would go, which, well, it's a PCI card.
- randomifcpfan 5y ago
  You’re in luck in that the development of Quake is pretty well documented. Both through a book and Carmack’s plan files https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom
- zeagle 5y ago
  This makes me really nostalgic for being introduced to SGI dogfight multiplayer on the local LAN I had occasional access to visiting a family member's employer. It really felt revolutionary for the day compared to the Pentium 1 whatever I had access to at home!
- andrewf 5y ago
  https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/master/by_year/johnc_plan_1996.txt https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast... is interesting. It transitions from todo list to a narrative format right after Quake launches :) In subsequent years you see Carmack opine on various high-perf platforms for gamers, and also for Quake level pre-processing (engine licensees had money to spend on productivity) Chapter 64 onwards of https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ is Mike Abrash's detailing of Quake's development. (tl;dr - Quake was developed on NeXTSTEP + an MS-DOS port of GCC (DJGPP), Quake2 was on Visual Studio + Windows NT (this was the era of that Carmack giant-monitor photo), there was an in-between period of free updates to the original Quake, like WinQuake, QuakeWorld and glQuake).
- rasz 5y ago
  >famous picture of John Carmack sitting in front of some SGI workstation Not Quake. Not 1995. The picture https://preview.redd.it/x3kqn3bjvb351.jpg?width=557&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ad418d029204b82bff5df6602ac0e664eed60cad https://preview.redd.it/x3kqn3bjvb351.jpg?width=557&format=p... is from Doom3 development, as seen in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjbEdWF1e-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjbEdWF1e-I There is Blue G3 on the picture after all, released in 1999.
throwmeariver1 5y ago
In another life I worked on a SGI Onyx for Print PrePress of Rotogravure Cylinders. Now I am working in VFX and sometimes I read up on the history of it usually the Onyx pops up and even if I did something completely different than the VFX artists at the time I get nostalgic.
habibur 5y ago
Also there was a Final Fantasy film produced at that time that took 1000 workstations, 200 persons and 4 years to render at a cost of $100m+. Thought it made only $80m.
- efsavage 5y ago
  And despite all that, by the time it was released, it was really not very impressive graphically, which was all it had going for it since it was a terrible film.
  - Pulcinella 5y ago
    Yeah the faces were alright for the time, but everything else wasn’t great. The environments in particular were pretty bad. The opening scenes of the movie have the characters flying through a burnt out wasteland and it really, effectively looks like a 16x16 texture has been draped over several square kilometers of mountains. Texture filtered, so no giant chunky pixels, but it still looked awful. Absolutely no detail. And this was one of the first things you saw in the movie! Also it was just dreadfully boring, which is basically the worst thing a piece of entertainment can be, even worse than the visuals.
    - latortuga 5y ago
      Amen! As a FF fan in the 90s, I was so incredibly hyped about this movie. I remember it major getting press in gaming magazines and going to it with my cousin. I also fondly remember it as the only movie I've ever walked out of.
      - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
        My friends and I were big Final Fantasy fans in the 90s but really had no interest in this film when it came out because it was clear that despite being directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, it didn't really tie-in to any of the FF games. Sure, all of the mainline Final Fantasy games are stand-alone stories, but when you base a movie on an existing property, that doesn't really fly.
bitwize 5y ago
In the video game I'm writing, I made the enemy computers blue and purple in color -- as a tribute to SGI in the era when it seemed RISC architecture really was gonna change everything.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  RISC did change everything - the primary computing device of users are ARM-based phones. Dependent on x86 servers in the cloud for much though. Of course it's arguable how RISCy ARM really is, but x86 is the only CISC left for non-embedded computing anymore, and really A) it's a hybrid with SIMD and a lot of recent instructions, and B) I the ISA is essentially internally virtualized atop a microarchitecture which operates vastly differently than the ISA - all the wacky stuff done for performance is tucked away there until it rears its head with Spectre-like issues and such. Further, couldn't it be said that RISC changed Intel? - one wonders what Intel would have done had RISC not been making gains in the 90's against Intel.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Microcoded CISC has been state of art method to implementing CISC cpus since ... 1960s? The one x86 that actually had a RISC core inside was AMD K5, which essentially used 29050 core with an x86 frontend slapped on it (in great simplification). Am29k architecture is still used and produced by Honeywell for their avionics systems.
atum47 5y ago
I was strolling in the mall when I noticed a really cool movie on a TV inside a random store; it was ffvii. Damn, I was like, this is the best 3d I have ever seen. By the way, I had never played the game by that point, none of the franchise. I kinda got familiar with the Loren just so I could watch the movie. Excellent job
jgrahamc 5y ago
This sort of archaeology is great fun. I spent a huge amount of time figuring out what was happening on the screens in the first Westworld film (1973): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  I recently put together a timeline of tech-ish things, to help put events like this into perspective: https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840b51f7f965059 https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840... Good for a few surprises: "wow, python is older than win 3.1!"
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Great channel, thanks :)
theonething 5y ago
The SGI Indy "pizza box" was also a VFX and 3D animation classic in that era.
- bluedino 5y ago
  The Indy didn't have any 3D hardware in it.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Really wondering how the Indy has this hagiographic reputation. It was, as far as I could tell at the time, the slowest and generally worst workstation you could buy. People bought them because they were waiting for unix technical software to be ported to Windows NT on x86 and didn't want to spend $100k per seat on RISC workstations they knew were already obsolete.
    - fit2rule 5y ago
    - anthk 5y ago
      >Windows NT on x86 and didn't want to spend $100k per seat on RISC workstations they knew were already obsolete. And Linux. https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6011 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6011 Much faster than SGI machines, zillions times cheaper, ridiculously cheaper. If you set the KDE theme to Motif or the SGI Indigo theme (QT allowed it) you had a pretty Irix copycat with a Slackware 8 CD pack. With DRI and 2.4.5 from the extra/ directory it was a beast. https://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware-8.0/ANNOUNCE.TXT https://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware-8.0/ANNOUNCE.TXT They used Red Hat, ok, but that Slackware release from 2001 was pretty close to their setup. Computers at Industrial Light Magic: https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjournal/articles/060/6011/6011s1.html https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjou...
  - theonething 5y ago
    No, it didn't, but the R5000 CPU had an enhanced instruction set that could do 3D rendering in software pretty well at the time. We used them at the VFX software shop I was interning at during those times.
paulpauper 5y ago
>The RAM on these machines were not industry standard — they were proprietary, 200 pin SGI RAM modules available in 16MB, 64MB, or 256MB variants. The memory board (known as MC3), had slots for 32 memory modules — and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version). >Think about that for just a moment. This was the mid-1990s. Let's pose the more theoretical question of what is the most powerful computer that could be built if enough recourses were summoned to make it. We're talking a single rackmount. What about a rackmount the size of a city.
- fuzzy2 5y ago
  Not possible because it could not be a single computer node. Electrical signals simply are too slow.
- shadowofneptune 5y ago
  I would imagine it'd be similar in architecture to existing supercomputers: many identical compute units connected over a network. Scaling a single rackmount computer design up to the size of a city would not be practical, a network would have to be included at some point to keep scaling adequately.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Big computers are kind of like that - it’s just that the network is composed of ridiculously fast buses and pipes and other forms of pushing vast amounts of data. The biggest issue you’ll hit as your computer gets bigger is latency, because even light has a speed limit. You can, however, cheat, by distributing your inputs and outputs in space so that, by the time information flows to the right places, that’s where it should be. That and adding more pipes for increased bandwidth.
- vmception 5y ago
  at this point its more about what metric of powerful are you comparing to? for example, nobody wants a liquid nitrogen cooled 8 gigahertz CPU any more. and measuring "flops" isn't that useful either. the old Silicon Graphics machines didn't have a single GPU in them and would not be able to render shaders or have/manipulate rasterized textures of basically any resolution, they just threw a lot of energy at a problem for a now-antiquated and useless approach to that problem. and finally, if you make something with a bunch custom chips with a bunch of pins with high bandwidth, then you don't have another metric to compare to something else. I'm open to the thought exercise but I can predict which directions the conversation would go, I'm just content with the variety of metrics on CPUmark these days.
mepian 5y ago
I'm glad the middle screen is explained, Symbolics always gets overshadowed by SGI. If you want to see it in action, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU
harel 5y ago
I received a demo of a $250k SGI when I was about 14 (1990). It powered a military F16 flight simulator and the experience was nothing short of mind blowing. Those machines were tightly packed magic.
- esaym 5y ago
  You were 14 and got $250k worth of hardware to demo? You got some explaining to do... (please)
  - neogodless 5y ago
    They said they received a demo. That is to say they were among people who got a few minutes to witness the $250k worth of hardware in action.
  - harel 5y ago
    Sorry, I've posted this before so always feel like blabbering if I repeat - but here goes - I was 14, my dad had a print business and printed all the cockpit panels for a private company developing an F16 simulator for the Israeli air force. He took me to their offices one weekend. The setup was a full 180 degree screen projections, a realistics 1:1 F16 cockpit with all the panels and buttons etc, and a SGI running the show. They gave me the spinning Beatle car demo, and then sat me down to fly. That day left a hard imprint (including the price tag on the SGI which they were proud to mention). I was an Amiga kid, and to top it all off, the other room had what seemed like hundreds of Amigas, which were used to build 3D models for the simultaor.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    I remember that flight simulator demo, it was something you'd find at events and trade shows or even super fancy arcades. This was back in the first VR 'boom' and tail end of the era of arcades. Some companies used SGI and similar powerful workstations to build simulator game pods, like for mechwarrior and spacecraft racing games. People would pay for a 5-10 minute session in one.
  - p_l 5y ago
xedarius 5y ago
I remember being on a stand next to SGI at E3 in 1997. They had a giant black truck in the arena like the one that Knight Rider drove into. They were selling these machines that looked way more powerful and expensive than anything the games industry could afford. People at the show were mainly debating when and if Intel could release a 1ghz processor. Stange what you remember.
mikehotel 5y ago
In case this article piques your interest to try out a modern version of IRIX: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
jscheel 5y ago
I studied 3d animation in college from 2001-2004. Our lab was outfitted with tons of SGI Octane workstations. By the end, we were getting better performance out the the one lone mac there, though. Was such an awesome animation lab. I kinda miss those days.
discardedrefuse 5y ago
Wow this brought back memories! In the late 90's, I got to work on SGI machines at college learning 3D animation in Maya v1! The school had 4 labs with about 30 SGI O2's in each; all networked with no security. I could send messages from my workstation to the teacher's open terminal session. No one there knew (or cared to learn) IRIX. When they converted the biggest lab to Windows NT4 everyone abandoned the SGI machines. Which worked out great for me, because it was much more peaceful in the SGI labs compared to the NT4 lab. Some of those StarCraft matches could get kinda rowdy!
midnightclubbed 5y ago
I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. As I recall each artist had an SGI Indigo2 and later on the SGI O2 because the standard artist workstation. I believe our lead artist used an SGI Onyx. Programmers had Indy2's with the internal N64 development boards. There were at least 2 rack mounted SGI machines used for large-scale rendering jobs (ie promotional images, magazine covers etc). May have been SGI Challenges (I know one certainly was) and were kept off-limits to most staff, at the time they were rumored to cost $250k each.
- rootsudo 5y ago
  That's really cool. :) I wonder if you should share any stories of working at Rareware during that time period?
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    ohhh i fantasize about being 3d artist / producer in the 90s. i collect whatever I can find from this era. I will make use of my Net Yaroze and release a PS1 game one day!!!
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. I've always been fascinated with Rareware. For such a tiny studio, the level of quality in the games they put out during that era is completely unparalleled, and many can justifiably still be held up as the greatest ever made. What was the secret sauce? What was it like working there? How was the culture?
  - valley_guy_12 5y ago
    As an outsider, I believe Rareware's secret sauce was a combination of a can-do, down-to-the-metal, fast-feedback-loop game development style that came from the pre-PC British bedroom game coders, a management team that understood how to manage game development and releases, and Nintendo's coaching on mascot development and general game polishing. Rareware's talents were big advantages in the early 3D game console era. But by the PS2 / Xbox era, their special skills didn't help as much. Today I'd say that Epic's Fortnite is the spiritual successor of the old Rareware.
amelius 5y ago
What happened to SGI?
- philipkglass 5y ago
  They made most of their money on expensive hardware. Their workstation market was killed by Windows NT and OS X (later Linux too) running on mass-market CPUs once graphics accelerator boards became good enough. Their server market was killed by Windows and Linux running on mass-market CPUs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Decline
- l1k 5y ago
  Filed chapter 11 twice. Bad management made the wrong bet, thought Itanium and Windows would take over the world. But what really broke all UNIX workstation manufacturers' backs was the unwillingness to cannibalize their products with affordable machines. SGI workstations were not affordable to students, so they got x86 machines instead and installed Linux. Google was built with x86-based Linux boxes because that's what the founders were using and could afford. UNIX workstation manufacturers lost an entire generation of young engineers that way. Apple eventually offered what they should have: Sleek, affordable machines with a rock-solid UNIX underneath a polished UI.
  - cartoonfoxes 5y ago
    I think it was 2001? that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) replaced their SGI workstations with linux boxes running RedHat 7.5 and powered by a Nvidia Quadro2 gpu.
    - samstave 5y ago
      That and in ~2004, ILM, along with the other LucasFilm and Games --> Lucas Presidio... during which a lot of SGI machines were scrapped. Source: I was the designer of the datacenter and network cabling infra for the Presidio.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
lostcolony 5y ago
A bit random, but, the guy on the left must have been nodding or something, and the camera being used had a slow shutter speed. I did a double take in seeing two mouths.
smm11 5y ago
Commodity hardware and good video cards crushed everything.
justinator 5y ago
Hard question to ask, but what was the workflow used in development? Two programmers sitting at many monitors powered by x different workstations, and a monitor. What are they all doing, say: here?
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  They were probably posing for a photo there. Pair programming wasn't coined as a term or popularized by Kent Beck until the early 2000s and 'Extreme Programming'.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Extreme Programming seemed to be en vogue among the early adopters that led to "agile manifesto" in late 1990s. That said, it looks like somewhat typical case of discussing a bit of design, with main artist sitting at the workstation, while the other person came from elsewhere.
mywittyname 5y ago
I'm astonished by the amount of money Squaresoft was investing in game development at the time. Obviously, it paid off big time for them, but I can't imagine they realized the game would be as successful as it was. If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never understood why the game was a success.
- endorphine 5y ago
  > If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never understood why the game was a success. This sounds like a pretty simplistic reasoning to me. Do you really believe this? The fact that your follow up game (or movie/book/album/painting) wasn't as successful as the previous one, doesn't mean you don't understand why the latter was a success. Understanding success and replicating it are two different things. Btw, I like FFVIII more than FFVII.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Surely they had some idea given that every game did better than the last until 7. You can only be the first immersive 3D game on a new platform once. Personally I still find FF6 to be one of the few 10/10 games that never gets old. After the 3D and tonal jump to more sci-fi I just wasnt as interested - and western PC RPGs started to get really good.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    One tricky aspect of sequels of very successful art, be it books, plays, movies, or games, is that a successful work transforms the audience. Doing more of the same isn’t enough - you need to find the right path to go from where they are now and just getting a bigger boat won’t do it.
- toto444 5y ago
  Would you say you know why it was a success? This game has had a massive impact on me and I am spending a lot of time trying to understand why (along with FF6 and Chrono Trigger). I have identified 3 things : the music plays a massive role, the way emotion are conveyed using by the posture of the characters as well and finally the story telling that mixes stories and battles and that can hardly be recreated using an other medium. Typing this I realise that does not explain why the follow-ups were not as good.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse. The machines were powered by between one and four MIPS processors (originally the R4400’s) — ranging from 100 MHz to 250 MHz. 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. > The RAM on these machines were not industry standard [...] and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version). 8 gig of RAM at a time when home users didn't even have 1 GB hard drives. 16 GB of RAM at a time when a home user's desktop could read memory at < 100 MB/s. Having those specs then would be like running a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now.
- bluedino 5y ago
  > 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. To be fair I don't think the 200MHz chips came out until 1995, when you could also get a Pentium Pro in similar speeds.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    I miss my W6-LI "Lightning" dual PPro board. Spec built that system with all SCSI internals for $5200 in about '95 (with just a single 180MHz PPro, upgraded later to dual)
- slightwinder 5y ago
  > 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. More precisely, it was the start of the Pentium era. The First Pentiums with 60/66 MHz were released in March 1993. But interesting enough, it seems the R4400 were already 64-bit.
  - theodric 5y ago
    My Indigo 2 R4400SC couldn't run 64-bit IRIX. For that I had to swap the motherboard and CPU for an R10000.
  - aledalgrande 5y ago
    I remember my friend buying one of the first Pentium desktops and plugging in the Carmageddon demo... WOW Before that I had only used 286, 486 and 586.
ei8ths 5y ago
one thing i dont miss, those monitors.
lispm 5y ago
Such a Lisp Machine is usually one machine with two screens. Typically it would be a XL1200 (or earlier an XL400). It would have a black&white console and a color screen. The color screen would be driven by a color graphics card, possibly a FrameThrower - which is an accelerated graphics card. The graphics editor seen is just the S-Paint part of S-Graphics - it could use a FrameThrower, but also other graphics cards. There was also S-Paint on the MacIvory running in a Macintosh. S-Graphics also ran on earlier Lisp Machines from Symbolics, like a 3670 from 1984. A bunch of TV studios, video production companies, animation studios and game developers were customers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 from 6:09 shows the using such a Paint system on a Symbolics. The software it runs is S-Graphics, which was later ported to SGIs and Windows machines as N-World, by Nichimen (then using Allegro CL from Franz Inc.).
- eddieh 5y ago
  I had no idea these machines existed. When tasked with writing a ray tracer way back in college, the first thing I did was create a scene description format based on S-expressions. Yesterday I was nostalgically looking at backups of the assignment and found my first scene file: (camera 0 0 -20) ; red sphere (sphere 0 1 50 5 (material (color 255 127 127) 0.8 0.8)) ; green sphere (sphere -20 1 200 9 (material (color 127 255 127) 0.8 0.8)) (plane 0 1 0 20 (material (color 127 127 255) 0.8 0.8)) I went so far as to make the scenes scriptable with Guile. I had another scene that procedurally generated spheres positioned about a helix, but that seems to be lost to the bit gods. To me, there's something very natural about using S-expressions to create graphics. I wish there was a video (with a high enough resolution) that shows the Lisp interactions—especially in the subdivision modeler.
  - lispm 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU&t=5s
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > there's something very natural about using S-expressions to create graphics. From time to time I threaten to rewrite Terraform in Lisp for that same reason.
opentokix 5y ago
Windows NT4 and 3DS MAX R1 was releasted in 1996.
mirchiseth 5y ago
Oh this post brought back so many fun memories of college days playing Flight Simulator on SGI boxes in the computer lab. Having used IRIX on SGI Indy, Windows 3.1 on PCs seemed like a toy.
georgewsinger 5y ago
It was a common practice in the 90s for creative engineers to use extremely expensive "supercomputer" workstations to pay for productivity gains & live on the bleeding edge (e.g. Silicon Graphics workstations, NeXT workstations, and so forth). Question: What is the equivalent way to do this today? That is, is there a way to pay a lot of money to use a computer which is 5-10 years ahead of its time? Ok so I'm pretty biased here, but I think the answer lies in VR computing. There's no doubt VR computers are more expensive than their PC/laptop counterparts, but they allow you to adopt a bleeding edge technology which is essentially 5+ years ahead of its time in terms of where it is on the "commodity computing" frontier. A good quote from Alan Kay I find pretty inspirational on this front: https://youtu.be/id1WShzzMCQ?t=3345 https://youtu.be/id1WShzzMCQ?t=3345 Here he basically advocates for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a computing machine, in order to compute on what will be a commodity product 10-15 years into the future. VR computers aren't this extreme on the cost curve, but I think there is something to this point of view which I find really inspirational.[1] [1] Caveat: I'm one of the founders of SimulaVR (https://simulavr.com https://simulavr.com), so admittedly am very biased here. But I do think VR provides a way to convert money into "better compute" in a way that hasn't been available since the 70s-90s super workstation era.
- arapacana 5y ago
  I respect the smoothness and honesty of your plug.
- Keyframe 5y ago
  You could shell out for Nvidia's DGX A100. Not the same level of futureness compared to current off the shelf stuff as this was back then.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  I think todays equivalent is more running a desktop with a 64 core CPU and 128 GB RAM (or more), with as many screens as you want (I don't find more than two useful, but preferences vary). I could see VR computing as the mobile version of that. Laptops can be pretty powerful, but their screens are limiting. VR gives you the screen real estate without requiring you to set up monitors where you are.
trollski 5y ago
Melatonic 5y ago
Now I want to know what they were using to animate the 3D assets that ran on the Sega Genesis (1988) and the add-on Sega 32X (released 1994)!
shaunxcode 5y ago
followed the link to see lisp machines - was not disappointed!
npunt 5y ago
Oh man the memories of this time. Around 97-98 was when workstations were on the way out and workstation cards were on the way in, but regardless these SGI boxes were just so lustworthy - the style, the performance, the otherness and clear superiority in all dimensions to my lowly hacked together PC. I was just a teen getting into 3D animation & game design in 1998, and since I couldn't ask my parents to mortgage the house to buy one, I wound up picking up a workstation card instead - a footlong Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 402 with 32mb ram and four 3dlabs chips - for a much more reasonable $750 used. I think about a year and a half before these went for $4k new, that was the pace of 3d innovation at the time. It suited me really well to learn Softimage 3D on until I got a job at Pandemic Studios as an artist/designer. Even this beast of a workstation card couldn't run Quake without errors though, there was still a separation of functionality between consumer 3D accelerators like 3dfx and the $1k+ workstation ones.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  How did you find out about 3D animation and the hardware used for it way back when? Were there any particular forums you visited or magazines you subscribed to?
  - npunt 5y ago
    I was part of the Total Annihilation community and a local LAN party scene with the Gamespy folks in 97-99, so got to meet some industry folks that way and learn what was going on. The big in that I got was going to a local 3d animation meetup in 98 where I met two artists that would become the art leads at Pandemic Studios when it were founded a few months later. I don't remember the exact sources, I just hustled a lot during those times because I wanted to get in the industry and was bored of high school, and I was lucky to be near the action in LA. I eventually took a Softimage 3D animation course in summer 98 and I needed a computer that could handle it! I was only 16-17 at the time and looking back I think I had a pretty wild experience as a teenage game designer during a really cool time in the industry. Might write about it one day.
efficax 5y ago
There used to be such a wonderful diversity of architectures, operating systems and platforms in comparison to today's boring landscape of really only 3 end user platforms and basically 2 viable server environments. Alas, i miss the old days
aasasd 5y ago
Forget the machines: I'm vaguely impressed by the controllers with lots of weird buttons, with analog knobs, and I think with some LCD screens—casually sitting before the monitors. These days every home video editor can buy such things—but were people doing much software video editing in '96? Wonder how many of them were sold in a year.
diskzero 5y ago
I started a video game company in 1994 that used SGI Indigo workstations to render animations created in StrataVision 3D [1]. The artists and animators would model, surface and animate on Macs and then send the files to the SGI machines for fast rendering. I can't remember the name of the SGI rendering software or find any signs of it on the internet. If we would have had the funds, it would have been nice to put Alias on the SGI boxes. We were later able to purchase Lightwave for Irix which was pretty nice, but StrataVision wasn't that bad in retrospect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrataVision_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrataVision_3D
- joering2 5y ago
  Tell us more about your video game company - any successes? titles out there? tell us more...
gdubs 5y ago
Very sexy setup for that era. As a kid I went to a computer faire near my hometown in the relative middle of nowhere and not only did I get to check out a Video Toaster, there were two guys there with an Onyx. As an SGI obsessed dork, I almost fell over. If I recall they used it primarily for architectural visualization. It was running a scene with trees that were two intersecting rectangles with texture and transparency maps. It’s hard to convey how cool this was at the time. Plus, that machine was in the $100,000 dollar range in 1995 dollars. Fun times. I’m bummed that over there years I lost the very slick printed material SGI sent me on their machines because I called up an asked.
Waterluvian 5y ago
Something I completely didn’t appreciate as a kid is that they designed an entire 3D scene for every background and rendered a 2D output of it. For some reason I just assumed it was all drawn.
dekhn 5y ago
the onyx reality engine was a true beast. I did a lot of computer graphics work in the late 90s and it was a very impressive tool. everybody laughed at my linux box running software OpenGL!
Anthony-G 5y ago
> Genera is an operating system, originally developed in the early 1980s, by Symbolics. > … a fork of the LISP Operating System developed at MIT. Virtual memory, a full GUI and window manager, neworking, Emacs… this thing had it all. I’d never heard of Genera until today. I read about it earlier this morning in an article on non-C operating systems¹. > Symbolics, the company which owned the first ever dotcom domain, built an entire OS in Lisp, called Genera. The last version, OpenGenera, ran on an emulator on DEC Alpha workstations, and today you can run it on Linux, but sadly the inheritors of the defunct company won't open-source it. ¹ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_systems/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_syste...
bgro 5y ago
In summary of my comment, if (text.contains("Final Fantasy VII") ){ $(this).upvote; }
peter303 5y ago
The NVIDA came along and crushed SGI with an add-on board for PCs instead of a custom workstation. Order of magnitude cheaper.
boopmaster 5y ago
I could say "I'm not that old" but I guess that's subjective, since the article says this is archeology. I think it's been said elsewhere, but those entry level SGI boxes were around $25,000 in the mid 90s (and oh boy did I ever drool over those things back then). I made out alright, with some friends on IRC having mailed me warez CDs, from their tiny middle-American town in Iowa to my depressed backwoods in WV... precious gold discs arrived loaded with wintel based 3D modeling and DAW software.

768 points by marcobambini 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Ah yes, good ol' SGI, it always brings a smile to my face reading these old war stories. I wish we could get some insight on the development of the first successful 3D game on PC, Quake by I'd software as there's a famous picture of John Carmack sitting in front of some SGI workstation with a monitor with a resolution ox 1920*1080( in 1995!) Also, SGI powered most VFX Studios of that era, so many great movies went through those machines before ending up on the big screen. It's insane how quickly 3dfx, Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely obsolete within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a blast. But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or black square boxes. [1] https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc6167be68994602a2be1f4153f81d5c3effa2 https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc61...

nebula8804 5y ago
Love those designs as the colors are now a direct representation of the 90s.
walrus01 5y ago
as I recall the SGI monitors were actually the pinnacle of Sony Trinitron CRT tech, rebadged, and connected using a 13W3 analog video link. Similar to the very high end Sun at the time. As neither SGI or Sun actually made CRTs, they went with the state of the art from the world's top CRT maker. Might have been some mitsubishi diamondtron in there too. In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display Nope, it was definitely 16:9, but I was mistaken, it was an Intergraph[1], not SGI like I originally thought, but still connected to an SGI workstation. Just look at this beast[1]. Also, the monitor is in the photo as well :) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/gxvm99/legendary_intergraph_interview_28hd96_all_we_know/ https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/gxvm99/legendary...
  - walrus01 5y ago
    I can't even imagine what that might have cost, it was probably sold for high-end CAD and similar...
    - dclowd9901 5y ago
      Sounds like it. A link in that thread points to someone stumbling upon a trove of six of them, owned by an avionics company.
- midnightclubbed 5y ago
  The SGI monitors were 4:3 but I don't recall the resolution. I do recall that they were beasts, weight of a small elephant and a not dissimilar size - you needed to pull your desk away from the wall to get any kind of distance to the screen. Over time their timings would drift and you could never get the entire screen completely sharp.
  - cfn 5y ago
    And there was a button you could press to "de-magnetize" the screen which made this awesome noise!
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      Degaussing. Most(all?) CRT monitors could do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjO2vVaxIWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjO2vVaxIWM
markus_zhang 5y ago
Just curious what are the state of arts graphic workstations nowadays? Mac pro?
- walrus01 5y ago
  really, really beefy dual socket xeon probably, or amd epyc, with 2TB+ RAM
  - Certified 5y ago
    Surprisingly, because most CAD and computer graphics programs are still largely not optimized for multi-threaded processors, the fastest workstations are typically using whatever processor tops the single core compute performance category, not the multicore. They are then paired with as much ram as the chipset supports. Also, when you are talking about pro graphics cards like Radeon Pro and the RTX A (formerly called quadro) lines, it only pays to upgrade to the next gen graphics card once your software vendor has had a year or two to integrate with a new hardware gen's capabilities. The pro gfx card market (at least when it pertains to OpenGL performance) is one area that will actually punish you for being too early an adopter, which is disappointing when cards go for several thousands of dollars new. The whole area of CG software has been stagnating for 5 years while OpenGL driver improvements have fallen out of favor for more bare metal processing approaches that are only now getting to feature parody and developer adoption like vulkan. Hopefully the next few years brings a positive trend in CG price to performance again as these new architectures actually start shipping in CG software products. As someone who works daily in CAD, the performance stagnation over the last 5-10 years has been depressing to say the least.
    - blevin 5y ago
      Feature parody is such a good turn of phrase.
    - markus_zhang 5y ago
      Thanks. This is totally new to me. I guess it's the same pic for professional level designers or game designers who basically work in a CAD like environment? For example the people who design levels and scripts for games such as Skyrim.
jl6 5y ago
I recall CRT monitors were capable of some quite high resolutions (often with a compromise to refresh rate), and it took a while for LCD panels to overtake them.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  I read that CRTs are still better in some respects
  - adamredwoods 5y ago
    Better at making my arm hairs stick up.
    - parenthesis 5y ago
      Thanks for reminding me, that as a child I used to love touching the TV screen for the static.
  - ridgered4 5y ago
    Input latency, flexibility of native resolution (they don't really have one). It's been awhile since I've looked at them side by side, but I think they're still better on black levels. I suspect color reproduction has caught up though. It's not surprising they fell out of favor though. Once the ghosting stopped being absolutely horrendous the LCD is just superior for office work. Uses less power, saves tons of desk space (and due to less weight, doesn't need a strong desk) and no flickering means a cheapo LCD is probably easier on the eyes than a cheapo CRT. I bet the CRT wwould still be used more often if the supply chain to make them didn't fall apart when the demand disappeared.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    For giving you cancer! When Sony first brought out their OLED reference monitors to the market, they had a demo at NAB to demonstrate the various screen types. All of the monitors were the equivalent reference version of that series: CRT, LCD, OLED. It was an interesting demo as they had the same feed going to each monitor. When showing how each monitor could display black, the OLED looked like it was off, the LCD was just a faint shade of gray, while the CRT was much much more noticeably not black from its glowing screen. I started to think to myself how they might be pushing the brightness on the CRT to make it look bad against the others. Right as I was thinking that to myself, the narrator said something to address this thought and then displayed bars. All 3 monitors were correctly adjusted. A gamed CRT with brightness adjusted would have been obvious at this point to those knowing how the test pattern is meant to look. The only thing I'd suggest that a CRT looks better is on true interlaced content.
bluedino 5y ago
It was an Intergraph monitor, connected to an Integraph workstation. Carmack didn't use SGI's for development but they did use their servers for level processing
pengaru 5y ago
> It's insane how quickly Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely obsolete within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a blast. Let's at least give some credit to 3dfx Interactive for PCs dethroning the 3D giants. There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a Voodoo card.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Pretty much. With the advent of semi fabs like TSMC, STM, etc. making their processes more accessible to smaller fabless companies, 3dfx, PowerVR, ATI, Nvidia and other startups in the 3D space back then, realized they can replace all those expensive discrete RISC chips SGI was using for their massive 'reality engine' PCBs, and instead design a cheaper and more efficient custom ASIC from the ground up that does nearly the same things SGI's reality engine was doing (triangle rendering and texture mapping was enough for a PC 3D accelerator back then), but at 1/100th of the price, and sell it to consumers. Fast forward, and we all know how the story played out and where the industry is today. >There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a Voodoo card. Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then, plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was wild as hell.[1] Even the box-art on their GPU boxes was the most memorable of any HW of that era. Anyone remember those eye glaring down on you from the store shelves?[2] I feel like this is now a lost art. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I [2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkiRZhLW0AQzR7g.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkiRZhLW0AQzR7g.jpg
  - olivertaylor 5y ago
    > Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then, plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was wild as hell.[1] Haha. Amazing commercials. I don’t remember those at all, but they’re 100% on brand for the times.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 5y ago
I'm still stumped by nvidia rise and how gaming propelled them into HPC/Supercomputing. Who knew playing video games who amplify research that much ?
- dylan604 5y ago
  every single teenager whose parental units asked where gaming skills would come into use later in life as an adult. at least the were hoping for something like that.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I bet zero 90s teenager said "mooom, how do you expect to cure cancer if you stop me from buying nv chips ?? how ?"
    - dylan604 5y ago
      I bet I can stack boxes in a truck better than any pre-Tetris playing person before me!
  - anthk 5y ago
    Unix was created to play SpaceWar, and now you have Linux, OSX and BSD's based on it.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      And here I thought it was created to control the phone system.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        Wasn’t it for editing texts?
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  Simple. Rendering 3D graphics for games and the supercomputing used by AI/ML/research both need the same thing: Embarrassingly parallel math calculations with little or no branching in the code. For example, a feed-forward neural network is just a whole lot of multiplication and addition. Transforming a 3D vertex in space to a 2D screen coordinate is matrix multiplication, which is just a whole lot of multiplication and addition. If you've already designed silicon to perform those operations in a single clock cycle, making it do HPC/SC rather than gaming isn't that big of a switch.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MisterTea 5y ago
> But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or black square boxes. This is what I miss most about the 90's and proprietary computer vendors: the exotic fun looking cases they had vs boring beige Mac and PC cases. I have an SGI 230 which was a last ditch effort to stay relevant via offering a regular x86 machine in an ATX SGI case. Unfortunately SGI ditched the snazzy cube logo sy then so it only has the lame fisher price sgi logo stenciled on it. It now houses a 12 core threadripper running Void Musl. Before that workstation, the 320 and 540 used Intel P3/Xeon chips on proprietary motherboards, 3D GPU/chip-set and even proprietary ram modules. Only ran nt4 and was a miserable failure of a machine.
- aftbit 5y ago
  Why Void? And why Void musl?
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    It works for what I need and I like the BSD influence. Musl explores a cleaner c library. I run glibc stuff like Steam in containers and I run an AMD GPU. I don't have any direct need for systemd so its interesting to try alternatives.
samstave 5y ago
Fun fact, the O2 had an 'optional' expansion port that was an additional ~$1,000 or so... but the thing is, ALL the O2s had this port - it was that if you paid for it, they popped the plastic cover off the case to reveal the port...
- p_l 5y ago
  Which expansion port are you talking about?
  - samstave 5y ago
    I cant recall what the port was... A serial port? I cant recall - but just that it was on all O2s and it was just knocking out the plastic cover to get access to it.
    - spitfire 5y ago
      One of the video ports. I think digital video port. The base model supported audio and "moose cam" (A webcam, in 1996!). If you paid extra you got video.
      - p_l 5y ago
        There were two video options you could buy, with analog and digital versions, plus there were special parts to provide alternative options for display outs (by default it had sgi-style 13W3 only)
      - bri3d 5y ago
        Oh, this was the SDI hack, but it needed a separate port expander - it was more involved than just removing a plate. You could buy the base AV1 "analog" video I/O card and then plug an SDI expansion breakout board (I think the Miranda VIVO was the most popular) into the webcam port, instead of buying the much more expensive AV2 "digital" video I/O card.
- bri3d 5y ago
  I'm not so sure about this, I've owned a lot of O2s. The only blocking plates on the rear cover of an O2 usually cover the spot where the Flat Panel Adapter or Dual Monitor board goes, and it's not installed by default, or the spot where a PCI card would go, which, well, it's a PCI card.
randomifcpfan 5y ago
You’re in luck in that the development of Quake is pretty well documented. Both through a book and Carmack’s plan files https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom
zeagle 5y ago
This makes me really nostalgic for being introduced to SGI dogfight multiplayer on the local LAN I had occasional access to visiting a family member's employer. It really felt revolutionary for the day compared to the Pentium 1 whatever I had access to at home!
andrewf 5y ago
https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/master/by_year/johnc_plan_1996.txt https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast... is interesting. It transitions from todo list to a narrative format right after Quake launches :) In subsequent years you see Carmack opine on various high-perf platforms for gamers, and also for Quake level pre-processing (engine licensees had money to spend on productivity) Chapter 64 onwards of https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ is Mike Abrash's detailing of Quake's development. (tl;dr - Quake was developed on NeXTSTEP + an MS-DOS port of GCC (DJGPP), Quake2 was on Visual Studio + Windows NT (this was the era of that Carmack giant-monitor photo), there was an in-between period of free updates to the original Quake, like WinQuake, QuakeWorld and glQuake).
rasz 5y ago
>famous picture of John Carmack sitting in front of some SGI workstation Not Quake. Not 1995. The picture https://preview.redd.it/x3kqn3bjvb351.jpg?width=557&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ad418d029204b82bff5df6602ac0e664eed60cad https://preview.redd.it/x3kqn3bjvb351.jpg?width=557&format=p... is from Doom3 development, as seen in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjbEdWF1e-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjbEdWF1e-I There is Blue G3 on the picture after all, released in 1999.

throwmeariver1 5y ago

In another life I worked on a SGI Onyx for Print PrePress of Rotogravure Cylinders. Now I am working in VFX and sometimes I read up on the history of it usually the Onyx pops up and even if I did something completely different than the VFX artists at the time I get nostalgic.

habibur 5y ago

Also there was a Final Fantasy film produced at that time that took 1000 workstations, 200 persons and 4 years to render at a cost of $100m+. Thought it made only $80m.

efsavage 5y ago
And despite all that, by the time it was released, it was really not very impressive graphically, which was all it had going for it since it was a terrible film.
- Pulcinella 5y ago
  Yeah the faces were alright for the time, but everything else wasn’t great. The environments in particular were pretty bad. The opening scenes of the movie have the characters flying through a burnt out wasteland and it really, effectively looks like a 16x16 texture has been draped over several square kilometers of mountains. Texture filtered, so no giant chunky pixels, but it still looked awful. Absolutely no detail. And this was one of the first things you saw in the movie! Also it was just dreadfully boring, which is basically the worst thing a piece of entertainment can be, even worse than the visuals.
  - latortuga 5y ago
    Amen! As a FF fan in the 90s, I was so incredibly hyped about this movie. I remember it major getting press in gaming magazines and going to it with my cousin. I also fondly remember it as the only movie I've ever walked out of.
    - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
      My friends and I were big Final Fantasy fans in the 90s but really had no interest in this film when it came out because it was clear that despite being directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, it didn't really tie-in to any of the FF games. Sure, all of the mainline Final Fantasy games are stand-alone stories, but when you base a movie on an existing property, that doesn't really fly.

bitwize 5y ago

In the video game I'm writing, I made the enemy computers blue and purple in color -- as a tribute to SGI in the era when it seemed RISC architecture really was gonna change everything.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
RISC did change everything - the primary computing device of users are ARM-based phones. Dependent on x86 servers in the cloud for much though. Of course it's arguable how RISCy ARM really is, but x86 is the only CISC left for non-embedded computing anymore, and really A) it's a hybrid with SIMD and a lot of recent instructions, and B) I the ISA is essentially internally virtualized atop a microarchitecture which operates vastly differently than the ISA - all the wacky stuff done for performance is tucked away there until it rears its head with Spectre-like issues and such. Further, couldn't it be said that RISC changed Intel? - one wonders what Intel would have done had RISC not been making gains in the 90's against Intel.
- p_l 5y ago
  Microcoded CISC has been state of art method to implementing CISC cpus since ... 1960s? The one x86 that actually had a RISC core inside was AMD K5, which essentially used 29050 core with an x86 frontend slapped on it (in great simplification). Am29k architecture is still used and produced by Honeywell for their avionics systems.

atum47 5y ago

I was strolling in the mall when I noticed a really cool movie on a TV inside a random store; it was ffvii. Damn, I was like, this is the best 3d I have ever seen. By the way, I had never played the game by that point, none of the franchise. I kinda got familiar with the Loren just so I could watch the movie. Excellent job

jgrahamc 5y ago

This sort of archaeology is great fun. I spent a huge amount of time figuring out what was happening on the screens in the first Westworld film (1973): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ

cellularmitosis 5y ago
I recently put together a timeline of tech-ish things, to help put events like this into perspective: https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840b51f7f965059 https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840... Good for a few surprises: "wow, python is older than win 3.1!"
kingcharles 5y ago
Great channel, thanks :)

theonething 5y ago

The SGI Indy "pizza box" was also a VFX and 3D animation classic in that era.

bluedino 5y ago
The Indy didn't have any 3D hardware in it.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Really wondering how the Indy has this hagiographic reputation. It was, as far as I could tell at the time, the slowest and generally worst workstation you could buy. People bought them because they were waiting for unix technical software to be ported to Windows NT on x86 and didn't want to spend $100k per seat on RISC workstations they knew were already obsolete.
  - fit2rule 5y ago
  - anthk 5y ago
    >Windows NT on x86 and didn't want to spend $100k per seat on RISC workstations they knew were already obsolete. And Linux. https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6011 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6011 Much faster than SGI machines, zillions times cheaper, ridiculously cheaper. If you set the KDE theme to Motif or the SGI Indigo theme (QT allowed it) you had a pretty Irix copycat with a Slackware 8 CD pack. With DRI and 2.4.5 from the extra/ directory it was a beast. https://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware-8.0/ANNOUNCE.TXT https://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware-8.0/ANNOUNCE.TXT They used Red Hat, ok, but that Slackware release from 2001 was pretty close to their setup. Computers at Industrial Light Magic: https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjournal/articles/060/6011/6011s1.html https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjou...
- theonething 5y ago
  No, it didn't, but the R5000 CPU had an enhanced instruction set that could do 3D rendering in software pretty well at the time. We used them at the VFX software shop I was interning at during those times.

paulpauper 5y ago

>The RAM on these machines were not industry standard — they were proprietary, 200 pin SGI RAM modules available in 16MB, 64MB, or 256MB variants. The memory board (known as MC3), had slots for 32 memory modules — and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version). >Think about that for just a moment. This was the mid-1990s. Let's pose the more theoretical question of what is the most powerful computer that could be built if enough recourses were summoned to make it. We're talking a single rackmount. What about a rackmount the size of a city.

fuzzy2 5y ago
Not possible because it could not be a single computer node. Electrical signals simply are too slow.
shadowofneptune 5y ago
I would imagine it'd be similar in architecture to existing supercomputers: many identical compute units connected over a network. Scaling a single rackmount computer design up to the size of a city would not be practical, a network would have to be included at some point to keep scaling adequately.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Big computers are kind of like that - it’s just that the network is composed of ridiculously fast buses and pipes and other forms of pushing vast amounts of data. The biggest issue you’ll hit as your computer gets bigger is latency, because even light has a speed limit. You can, however, cheat, by distributing your inputs and outputs in space so that, by the time information flows to the right places, that’s where it should be. That and adding more pipes for increased bandwidth.
vmception 5y ago
at this point its more about what metric of powerful are you comparing to? for example, nobody wants a liquid nitrogen cooled 8 gigahertz CPU any more. and measuring "flops" isn't that useful either. the old Silicon Graphics machines didn't have a single GPU in them and would not be able to render shaders or have/manipulate rasterized textures of basically any resolution, they just threw a lot of energy at a problem for a now-antiquated and useless approach to that problem. and finally, if you make something with a bunch custom chips with a bunch of pins with high bandwidth, then you don't have another metric to compare to something else. I'm open to the thought exercise but I can predict which directions the conversation would go, I'm just content with the variety of metrics on CPUmark these days.

mepian 5y ago

I'm glad the middle screen is explained, Symbolics always gets overshadowed by SGI. If you want to see it in action, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU

harel 5y ago

I received a demo of a $250k SGI when I was about 14 (1990). It powered a military F16 flight simulator and the experience was nothing short of mind blowing. Those machines were tightly packed magic.

esaym 5y ago
You were 14 and got $250k worth of hardware to demo? You got some explaining to do... (please)
- neogodless 5y ago
  They said they received a demo. That is to say they were among people who got a few minutes to witness the $250k worth of hardware in action.
- harel 5y ago
  Sorry, I've posted this before so always feel like blabbering if I repeat - but here goes - I was 14, my dad had a print business and printed all the cockpit panels for a private company developing an F16 simulator for the Israeli air force. He took me to their offices one weekend. The setup was a full 180 degree screen projections, a realistics 1:1 F16 cockpit with all the panels and buttons etc, and a SGI running the show. They gave me the spinning Beatle car demo, and then sat me down to fly. That day left a hard imprint (including the price tag on the SGI which they were proud to mention). I was an Amiga kid, and to top it all off, the other room had what seemed like hundreds of Amigas, which were used to build 3D models for the simultaor.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  I remember that flight simulator demo, it was something you'd find at events and trade shows or even super fancy arcades. This was back in the first VR 'boom' and tail end of the era of arcades. Some companies used SGI and similar powerful workstations to build simulator game pods, like for mechwarrior and spacecraft racing games. People would pay for a 5-10 minute session in one.
- p_l 5y ago

xedarius 5y ago

I remember being on a stand next to SGI at E3 in 1997. They had a giant black truck in the arena like the one that Knight Rider drove into. They were selling these machines that looked way more powerful and expensive than anything the games industry could afford. People at the show were mainly debating when and if Intel could release a 1ghz processor. Stange what you remember.

mikehotel 5y ago

In case this article piques your interest to try out a modern version of IRIX: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/

jscheel 5y ago

I studied 3d animation in college from 2001-2004. Our lab was outfitted with tons of SGI Octane workstations. By the end, we were getting better performance out the the one lone mac there, though. Was such an awesome animation lab. I kinda miss those days.

discardedrefuse 5y ago

Wow this brought back memories! In the late 90's, I got to work on SGI machines at college learning 3D animation in Maya v1! The school had 4 labs with about 30 SGI O2's in each; all networked with no security. I could send messages from my workstation to the teacher's open terminal session. No one there knew (or cared to learn) IRIX. When they converted the biggest lab to Windows NT4 everyone abandoned the SGI machines. Which worked out great for me, because it was much more peaceful in the SGI labs compared to the NT4 lab. Some of those StarCraft matches could get kinda rowdy!

midnightclubbed 5y ago

I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. As I recall each artist had an SGI Indigo2 and later on the SGI O2 because the standard artist workstation. I believe our lead artist used an SGI Onyx. Programmers had Indy2's with the internal N64 development boards. There were at least 2 rack mounted SGI machines used for large-scale rendering jobs (ie promotional images, magazine covers etc). May have been SGI Challenges (I know one certainly was) and were kept off-limits to most staff, at the time they were rumored to cost $250k each.

rootsudo 5y ago
That's really cool. :) I wonder if you should share any stories of working at Rareware during that time period?
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  ohhh i fantasize about being 3d artist / producer in the 90s. i collect whatever I can find from this era. I will make use of my Net Yaroze and release a PS1 game one day!!!
ramesh31 5y ago
>I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. I've always been fascinated with Rareware. For such a tiny studio, the level of quality in the games they put out during that era is completely unparalleled, and many can justifiably still be held up as the greatest ever made. What was the secret sauce? What was it like working there? How was the culture?
- valley_guy_12 5y ago
  As an outsider, I believe Rareware's secret sauce was a combination of a can-do, down-to-the-metal, fast-feedback-loop game development style that came from the pre-PC British bedroom game coders, a management team that understood how to manage game development and releases, and Nintendo's coaching on mascot development and general game polishing. Rareware's talents were big advantages in the early 3D game console era. But by the PS2 / Xbox era, their special skills didn't help as much. Today I'd say that Epic's Fortnite is the spiritual successor of the old Rareware.

amelius 5y ago

What happened to SGI?

philipkglass 5y ago
They made most of their money on expensive hardware. Their workstation market was killed by Windows NT and OS X (later Linux too) running on mass-market CPUs once graphics accelerator boards became good enough. Their server market was killed by Windows and Linux running on mass-market CPUs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Decline
l1k 5y ago
Filed chapter 11 twice. Bad management made the wrong bet, thought Itanium and Windows would take over the world. But what really broke all UNIX workstation manufacturers' backs was the unwillingness to cannibalize their products with affordable machines. SGI workstations were not affordable to students, so they got x86 machines instead and installed Linux. Google was built with x86-based Linux boxes because that's what the founders were using and could afford. UNIX workstation manufacturers lost an entire generation of young engineers that way. Apple eventually offered what they should have: Sleek, affordable machines with a rock-solid UNIX underneath a polished UI.
- cartoonfoxes 5y ago
  I think it was 2001? that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) replaced their SGI workstations with linux boxes running RedHat 7.5 and powered by a Nvidia Quadro2 gpu.
  - samstave 5y ago
    That and in ~2004, ILM, along with the other LucasFilm and Games --> Lucas Presidio... during which a lot of SGI machines were scrapped. Source: I was the designer of the datacenter and network cabling infra for the Presidio.
- zozbot234 5y ago

lostcolony 5y ago

A bit random, but, the guy on the left must have been nodding or something, and the camera being used had a slow shutter speed. I did a double take in seeing two mouths.

smm11 5y ago

Commodity hardware and good video cards crushed everything.

justinator 5y ago

Hard question to ask, but what was the workflow used in development? Two programmers sitting at many monitors powered by x different workstations, and a monitor. What are they all doing, say: here?

qbasic_forever 5y ago
They were probably posing for a photo there. Pair programming wasn't coined as a term or popularized by Kent Beck until the early 2000s and 'Extreme Programming'.
- p_l 5y ago
  Extreme Programming seemed to be en vogue among the early adopters that led to "agile manifesto" in late 1990s. That said, it looks like somewhat typical case of discussing a bit of design, with main artist sitting at the workstation, while the other person came from elsewhere.

mywittyname 5y ago

I'm astonished by the amount of money Squaresoft was investing in game development at the time. Obviously, it paid off big time for them, but I can't imagine they realized the game would be as successful as it was. If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never understood why the game was a success.

endorphine 5y ago
> If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never understood why the game was a success. This sounds like a pretty simplistic reasoning to me. Do you really believe this? The fact that your follow up game (or movie/book/album/painting) wasn't as successful as the previous one, doesn't mean you don't understand why the latter was a success. Understanding success and replicating it are two different things. Btw, I like FFVIII more than FFVII.
- redisman 5y ago
  Surely they had some idea given that every game did better than the last until 7. You can only be the first immersive 3D game on a new platform once. Personally I still find FF6 to be one of the few 10/10 games that never gets old. After the 3D and tonal jump to more sci-fi I just wasnt as interested - and western PC RPGs started to get really good.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  One tricky aspect of sequels of very successful art, be it books, plays, movies, or games, is that a successful work transforms the audience. Doing more of the same isn’t enough - you need to find the right path to go from where they are now and just getting a bigger boat won’t do it.
toto444 5y ago
Would you say you know why it was a success? This game has had a massive impact on me and I am spending a lot of time trying to understand why (along with FF6 and Chrono Trigger). I have identified 3 things : the music plays a massive role, the way emotion are conveyed using by the posture of the characters as well and finally the story telling that mixes stories and battles and that can hardly be recreated using an other medium. Typing this I realise that does not explain why the follow-ups were not as good.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse. The machines were powered by between one and four MIPS processors (originally the R4400’s) — ranging from 100 MHz to 250 MHz. 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. > The RAM on these machines were not industry standard [...] and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version). 8 gig of RAM at a time when home users didn't even have 1 GB hard drives. 16 GB of RAM at a time when a home user's desktop could read memory at < 100 MB/s. Having those specs then would be like running a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now.

bluedino 5y ago
> 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. To be fair I don't think the 200MHz chips came out until 1995, when you could also get a Pentium Pro in similar speeds.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  I miss my W6-LI "Lightning" dual PPro board. Spec built that system with all SCSI internals for $5200 in about '95 (with just a single 180MHz PPro, upgraded later to dual)
slightwinder 5y ago
> 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. More precisely, it was the start of the Pentium era. The First Pentiums with 60/66 MHz were released in March 1993. But interesting enough, it seems the R4400 were already 64-bit.
- theodric 5y ago
  My Indigo 2 R4400SC couldn't run 64-bit IRIX. For that I had to swap the motherboard and CPU for an R10000.
- aledalgrande 5y ago
  I remember my friend buying one of the first Pentium desktops and plugging in the Carmageddon demo... WOW Before that I had only used 286, 486 and 586.

ei8ths 5y ago

one thing i dont miss, those monitors.

lispm 5y ago

Such a Lisp Machine is usually one machine with two screens. Typically it would be a XL1200 (or earlier an XL400). It would have a black&white console and a color screen. The color screen would be driven by a color graphics card, possibly a FrameThrower - which is an accelerated graphics card. The graphics editor seen is just the S-Paint part of S-Graphics - it could use a FrameThrower, but also other graphics cards. There was also S-Paint on the MacIvory running in a Macintosh. S-Graphics also ran on earlier Lisp Machines from Symbolics, like a 3670 from 1984. A bunch of TV studios, video production companies, animation studios and game developers were customers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 from 6:09 shows the using such a Paint system on a Symbolics. The software it runs is S-Graphics, which was later ported to SGIs and Windows machines as N-World, by Nichimen (then using Allegro CL from Franz Inc.).

eddieh 5y ago
I had no idea these machines existed. When tasked with writing a ray tracer way back in college, the first thing I did was create a scene description format based on S-expressions. Yesterday I was nostalgically looking at backups of the assignment and found my first scene file: (camera 0 0 -20) ; red sphere (sphere 0 1 50 5 (material (color 255 127 127) 0.8 0.8)) ; green sphere (sphere -20 1 200 9 (material (color 127 255 127) 0.8 0.8)) (plane 0 1 0 20 (material (color 127 127 255) 0.8 0.8)) I went so far as to make the scenes scriptable with Guile. I had another scene that procedurally generated spheres positioned about a helix, but that seems to be lost to the bit gods. To me, there's something very natural about using S-expressions to create graphics. I wish there was a video (with a high enough resolution) that shows the Lisp interactions—especially in the subdivision modeler.
- lispm 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU&t=5s
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > there's something very natural about using S-expressions to create graphics. From time to time I threaten to rewrite Terraform in Lisp for that same reason.

opentokix 5y ago

Windows NT4 and 3DS MAX R1 was releasted in 1996.

mirchiseth 5y ago

Oh this post brought back so many fun memories of college days playing Flight Simulator on SGI boxes in the computer lab. Having used IRIX on SGI Indy, Windows 3.1 on PCs seemed like a toy.

georgewsinger 5y ago

It was a common practice in the 90s for creative engineers to use extremely expensive "supercomputer" workstations to pay for productivity gains & live on the bleeding edge (e.g. Silicon Graphics workstations, NeXT workstations, and so forth). Question: What is the equivalent way to do this today? That is, is there a way to pay a lot of money to use a computer which is 5-10 years ahead of its time? Ok so I'm pretty biased here, but I think the answer lies in VR computing. There's no doubt VR computers are more expensive than their PC/laptop counterparts, but they allow you to adopt a bleeding edge technology which is essentially 5+ years ahead of its time in terms of where it is on the "commodity computing" frontier. A good quote from Alan Kay I find pretty inspirational on this front: https://youtu.be/id1WShzzMCQ?t=3345 https://youtu.be/id1WShzzMCQ?t=3345 Here he basically advocates for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a computing machine, in order to compute on what will be a commodity product 10-15 years into the future. VR computers aren't this extreme on the cost curve, but I think there is something to this point of view which I find really inspirational.[1] [1] Caveat: I'm one of the founders of SimulaVR (https://simulavr.com https://simulavr.com), so admittedly am very biased here. But I do think VR provides a way to convert money into "better compute" in a way that hasn't been available since the 70s-90s super workstation era.

arapacana 5y ago
I respect the smoothness and honesty of your plug.
Keyframe 5y ago
You could shell out for Nvidia's DGX A100. Not the same level of futureness compared to current off the shelf stuff as this was back then.
wongarsu 5y ago
I think todays equivalent is more running a desktop with a 64 core CPU and 128 GB RAM (or more), with as many screens as you want (I don't find more than two useful, but preferences vary). I could see VR computing as the mobile version of that. Laptops can be pretty powerful, but their screens are limiting. VR gives you the screen real estate without requiring you to set up monitors where you are.

trollski 5y ago

Melatonic 5y ago

Now I want to know what they were using to animate the 3D assets that ran on the Sega Genesis (1988) and the add-on Sega 32X (released 1994)!

shaunxcode 5y ago

followed the link to see lisp machines - was not disappointed!

npunt 5y ago

Oh man the memories of this time. Around 97-98 was when workstations were on the way out and workstation cards were on the way in, but regardless these SGI boxes were just so lustworthy - the style, the performance, the otherness and clear superiority in all dimensions to my lowly hacked together PC. I was just a teen getting into 3D animation & game design in 1998, and since I couldn't ask my parents to mortgage the house to buy one, I wound up picking up a workstation card instead - a footlong Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 402 with 32mb ram and four 3dlabs chips - for a much more reasonable $750 used. I think about a year and a half before these went for $4k new, that was the pace of 3d innovation at the time. It suited me really well to learn Softimage 3D on until I got a job at Pandemic Studios as an artist/designer. Even this beast of a workstation card couldn't run Quake without errors though, there was still a separation of functionality between consumer 3D accelerators like 3dfx and the $1k+ workstation ones.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
How did you find out about 3D animation and the hardware used for it way back when? Were there any particular forums you visited or magazines you subscribed to?
- npunt 5y ago
  I was part of the Total Annihilation community and a local LAN party scene with the Gamespy folks in 97-99, so got to meet some industry folks that way and learn what was going on. The big in that I got was going to a local 3d animation meetup in 98 where I met two artists that would become the art leads at Pandemic Studios when it were founded a few months later. I don't remember the exact sources, I just hustled a lot during those times because I wanted to get in the industry and was bored of high school, and I was lucky to be near the action in LA. I eventually took a Softimage 3D animation course in summer 98 and I needed a computer that could handle it! I was only 16-17 at the time and looking back I think I had a pretty wild experience as a teenage game designer during a really cool time in the industry. Might write about it one day.

efficax 5y ago

There used to be such a wonderful diversity of architectures, operating systems and platforms in comparison to today's boring landscape of really only 3 end user platforms and basically 2 viable server environments. Alas, i miss the old days

aasasd 5y ago

Forget the machines: I'm vaguely impressed by the controllers with lots of weird buttons, with analog knobs, and I think with some LCD screens—casually sitting before the monitors. These days every home video editor can buy such things—but were people doing much software video editing in '96? Wonder how many of them were sold in a year.

diskzero 5y ago

I started a video game company in 1994 that used SGI Indigo workstations to render animations created in StrataVision 3D [1]. The artists and animators would model, surface and animate on Macs and then send the files to the SGI machines for fast rendering. I can't remember the name of the SGI rendering software or find any signs of it on the internet. If we would have had the funds, it would have been nice to put Alias on the SGI boxes. We were later able to purchase Lightwave for Irix which was pretty nice, but StrataVision wasn't that bad in retrospect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrataVision_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrataVision_3D

joering2 5y ago
Tell us more about your video game company - any successes? titles out there? tell us more...

gdubs 5y ago

Very sexy setup for that era. As a kid I went to a computer faire near my hometown in the relative middle of nowhere and not only did I get to check out a Video Toaster, there were two guys there with an Onyx. As an SGI obsessed dork, I almost fell over. If I recall they used it primarily for architectural visualization. It was running a scene with trees that were two intersecting rectangles with texture and transparency maps. It’s hard to convey how cool this was at the time. Plus, that machine was in the $100,000 dollar range in 1995 dollars. Fun times. I’m bummed that over there years I lost the very slick printed material SGI sent me on their machines because I called up an asked.

Waterluvian 5y ago

Something I completely didn’t appreciate as a kid is that they designed an entire 3D scene for every background and rendered a 2D output of it. For some reason I just assumed it was all drawn.

dekhn 5y ago

the onyx reality engine was a true beast. I did a lot of computer graphics work in the late 90s and it was a very impressive tool. everybody laughed at my linux box running software OpenGL!

Anthony-G 5y ago

> Genera is an operating system, originally developed in the early 1980s, by Symbolics. > … a fork of the LISP Operating System developed at MIT. Virtual memory, a full GUI and window manager, neworking, Emacs… this thing had it all. I’d never heard of Genera until today. I read about it earlier this morning in an article on non-C operating systems¹. > Symbolics, the company which owned the first ever dotcom domain, built an entire OS in Lisp, called Genera. The last version, OpenGenera, ran on an emulator on DEC Alpha workstations, and today you can run it on Linux, but sadly the inheritors of the defunct company won't open-source it. ¹ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_systems/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_syste...

bgro 5y ago

In summary of my comment, if (text.contains("Final Fantasy VII") ){ $(this).upvote; }

peter303 5y ago

The NVIDA came along and crushed SGI with an add-on board for PCs instead of a custom workstation. Order of magnitude cheaper.

boopmaster 5y ago

I could say "I'm not that old" but I guess that's subjective, since the article says this is archeology. I think it's been said elsewhere, but those entry level SGI boxes were around $25,000 in the mid 90s (and oh boy did I ever drool over those things back then). I made out alright, with some friends on IRC having mailed me warez CDs, from their tiny middle-American town in Iowa to my depressed backwoods in WV... precious gold discs arrived loaded with wintel based 3D modeling and DAW software.