9 ms·

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 succe

• 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
        • cfn 5y ago
          Yes that was the word I was looking for. I gave away my last monster CRT 20 years ago and these things fade away from memory. Thanks!
      • AyyWS 5y ago
        Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAnvHq_aFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAnvHq_aFE
        • cfn 5y ago
          Yes but I could degauss mine when it was on. The image would rotate back and forth some 30 or 40 degrees which was fun.
      • throwanem 5y ago
        Degaussing buttons were common on high-end CRT displays. They were always that fun! In the mid-2000s, I worked at a place where we had several "decommissioned" Indys living a second life as Apache servers for some of our hosting clients - not uncommon in those days. We had one of the big 19" 4:3 CRTs on a KVM, too, and its weight put a noticeable if graceful curve in the MDF desktop on which it stood.
  • rjzzleep 5y ago
    I still remember buying a dirt cheap SGI monitor back in the day. But it took a while before I figured out how to mod the cable because of sync on green.
    • dylan604 5y ago
      Yeah, component cables with 5 BNCs RGB+Hsync+Vsync. Good times!!
      • jeffreygoesto 5y ago
        Fixed Frequency, crafting an X mode line on a cheap 14", no text readable during boot, fingers crossed if X came up ok, if not, swap monitors, boot with "init=/bin/bash" and goto 1...
  • dylan604 5y ago
    There's a semi-easy way to spot a Trinitron if you knew where/how to look for the tell. There were 2 horizontal lines that were shadows from some bit of wiring that could be seen when viewing the screen when certain images/patterns like solid colors were displayed.
    • rasz 5y ago
      Worked for national PC parts distributor in ~1999. We were regularly having shops trying to return CTX monitors because of the "bad lines" :)
    • syncsynchalt 5y ago
      I had a Sun workstation with a beast of a 19" Trinitron CRT in the late '90s in my apartment (working remotely for a California startup) and remember it fondly. The lines you're referring to are called "damping wires" in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
    • valley_guy_12 5y ago
      I remember that shadow! FWIW it was just one line in smaller Trinitrons, and it was located 1/3rd of the way from the top or bottom edge rather than in the middle. Apple mounted the Trinitron tube upside down compared to other vendors, so that the faint horizontal line would be in the bottom third of the screen rather than the top third.
    • JohnBooty 5y ago
      There's an even easier way on older Trinitrons - the bulge of the glass is different. Notice how the left and right sides of the glass are straight vertical lines, and only the top and bottom edges are curved: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consumer-electronics-hall-of-fame-sony-trinitron https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consumer-electronics-hall-of-f... Versus a standard CRT, where all four sides are curved: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-tv-scott-chimber.html https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-tv-scott-chimber... Of course, the final-gen Trinitons (circa 2000 onward) had truly flat glass, so there was no tell-tale curvature to look for. And once Sony's patents started expiring, there were competitors like Mitsubishi's Diamondtron displays with glass shaped like Trinitrons. I'm not sure if they had the two horizontal lines like Trinitrons.
  • Melatonic 5y ago
    You could also "overclock" them to run at higher refresh rates (frame rates, hz) depending on the resolution. The top CRT's were blowing away LCD's for many, many years. Good color, higher refresh, good dynamic range, etc etc. Those 21" CRT's were massive but I held onto my second hand one for as long as I could. I remember getting the VGA adapter for the Dreamcast and it looked damn good on that CRT!
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      Driving CRTs at bad frequencies was a common way of letting all the magic smoke out, back in the day.
      • Melatonic 5y ago
        Throwing them in a trash bin and then smashing them with a sledge hammer was also a good way to do that and a bit louder :-D
      • rasz 5y ago
        This is a myth, true only to some very early(as in 87-89) VGA fixed frequency monitors.
• 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.