6 ms·

SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. You knew upon looking that

by wenc 3y ago

SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. You knew upon looking that they weren't normal PCs but "workstations", a cut above what us plebeians could afford. While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2.

SMP-UX 3y ago
I rather think Motif looks fine. People complain but eye candy is wasted resources.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  „The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted.
  - SMP-UX 3y ago
    What I meant was that who wants 500 plus megs of RAM dedicated solely to transparency and pretty special effects on the desktop? Idiots that's who. Edit: You might not see the problem if you have a computer with 32 GB of RAM and I certainly do. However I like to ensure that responsiveness is first up. IRIX Motif is 2D accelerated and very snappy as it's multi threaded and designed for power users. I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. What I'm basically trying to say is that visual effects that aren't well designed aren't worth the resources they take up. Functionality over aesthetics any day.
    - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      I‘d agree to that. Aesthetics need not be wasteful, minimalism can be beautiful if done right and be very efficient, as the whole APL ecosystem shows. Its just that Motif attempts neither baroque opulence nor restrained elegance, its just carelessly ugly, and that is a sin against life.
      - arp242 3y ago
        What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided. Or the divided opinions on various styles of music. etc. I personally don't care much for the Motif looks (although I've only used OpenMotif – I'm not sure how it compares to IRIX's implementation; from some quick screenshots I looked up it seems IRIX looked better) but describing it as objectively "ugly" or "a sin against life" is just wrong.
        MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
        > What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. No.
        coldtea 3y ago
        >What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided Strongly divided, as to the strength of like or dislike, yes. But as for the split, it's pretentious architects and a handful of laymen outliers on one side, and billions of people on the other. And whenever people vote with their wallets (as tourists, or picking where to live, etc) they shit all over brutalist monstrocities.
        arp242 3y ago
        I've seen quite a few people defend brutalist architecture on HN, I'm not a fan of dismissing people's tastes as "pretentious". Plus some of those comments (which I can't be bothered to look up right now) have convinced me that the things people really hate is the worst of brutalism, rather than the concept as such (it's still not my favourite style, but overall less bad than I thought before). But we can use other examples – I don't really want to talk about brutalism as such – like metal music, or paintings from Picasso or Mondriaan, or the discussion about whether or not Alien is a good film that still holds up in 2023 from earlier this week, or any number of things.
    - brirec 3y ago
      Jesus, we’re still arguing about the merit of desktop composition after all these years? Do yourself a favor and try comparing the responsiveness and resource usage of, e.g., KDE Plasma with desktop composition off vs on. You’ll probably be really shocked when you see how much more CPU you need to do something as simple as scrolling a browser window. Really, try it. Any browser, scroll around on something and look at your CPU usage and the framerate of your screen. Or image editing — try panning around an image. Doesn’t matter what editor/viewer either, since they all have to draw on your X server. Even just moving windows around on top of one another — everything is just so much more efficient when you offload it to a hardware accelerator. Does it use more RAM? Yeah, a little, because the way it works is by keeping the entire contents of the windows in memory rather than culling anything that’s not exposed in front. It’s definitely not 500 MB more, though, and it definitely can (and does) take advantage of any dedicated VRAM available. And the trade off of being able to just dump a framebuffer to the viewport instead of repeatedly computing what’s been culled 60+ times a second is definitely worth it to me, but if you still prefer not using acceleration, there’s always the option to just not use it.
      - arp242 3y ago
        I didn't really see the previous poster mention desktop composition at all? What I have seen is many computers that seem to spend more time calculating various animations than actually animating stuff. When I worked in a computer shop years ago I often turned off animations and transparencies for people who came in with slow computers (XP, Vista, 7) and they were generally happy with the speed-up and didn't mind the lesser visuals at all.
      - hulitu 3y ago
        Which are the merits of desktop composition besides drawing the whole screen just to redraw the cursor ?
        formerly_proven 3y ago
        Cursor ain't in the frame buffer, moving it around only triggers a render if an application rendered a change in response to the mouse move event.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      500 megs of RAM TCO is like a cup of coffee. I drink coffee every day. Would you say I "dedicate" that cup of coffee to myself?
    - jen20 3y ago
      I recall for many years running OSX on a PowerBook with 256MB RAM total, with no problems. That machine was in use until the switch to Intels. It was fine - indeed more responsive than most Windows machines laden with crapware that I encounter today with many times the resources.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      > I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. You're misattributing blame here. Aqua, Aero, and Metro were themselves just UI themes/design languages. They did not cause performance problems. To the underlying compositor it doesn't matter if a button is brightly colored beveled triangle or a flat rectangle. A 32x32px button is 1,024 pixels that need to be drawn to a buffer irrespective of what's in those pixels. The performance problems in those UIs were almost always related to the compositor and underlying hardware (or drivers for same). Without hardware accelerated drawing, even just 2D acceleration, the compositor was limited by the CPU and memory. The hardware limitations are only problematic at the margins though. At those various systems' introduction the performance issues were only at the low end. As the "low end" improved performance became a non-issue. Aero sucked when it was introduced because the 3D compositor was enabled on underpowered graphics hardware at the request of OEMs. Aqua ran great on then-new PowerMacs but sucked on the mobile graphics chips in iMacs and all the Mac notebooks of the time.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > „The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted. That's an extreme view; GP didn't indicate that all UI toolkits needed to resemble Motif. I mean, would it be fair to sum up your point as "Prisons are maximally efficient concrete boxes, all houses should be eye candy"? Motif is (was at the time) just one of a large number of GUI designs. I quite liked it myself at the time, too.
    - SMP-UX 3y ago
      More to the point I think effects are fine if they don't take up massive amounts of resources.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - forgotmypw17 3y ago
    The Cathedral should be beautiful. Residences are up for debate. Adding eye candy to a workbench or a toolbox is less than helpful, if you ask me.
    - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      What grey and utilitarian relationship to the world. I, for one, am guided by the beauty of our weapons.
    - criddell 3y ago
      Donald Norman has studied this and concluded that attractive things work better. A beautiful UI is one you will want to work at and will inspire creativity and problem solving. It can make your work seem easier. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_Design_Attractive_Things_Work_Better https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_D...
      - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
        thank god theres a study for that I was starting to think the greeks and romans had it all wrong and we could raze rome
- forgotmypw17 3y ago
  I agree, as far as my workstation goes, it's like putting eye candy on a hammer. I use this: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
  - heyoni 3y ago
    Or lipstick on a pig!
    - hulitu 3y ago
      There are a lot of pigs who wear lipstick, so i don't underestand what's wrong with it. /s
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  Not-so-Common Desktop Environment is a modern attempt at the style. I don't end up using it, but it reminds me wonderfully of a time when computers were made by and for people. https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
  - anthk 3y ago
    Uh, CDE was corporation-ware. The computers for the people and by the people used a hacked fvwm and rxvt making magic on Intel PC's with a Pentium I MMX /II running faster and snappier than even Irix and Sparc machines except for OpenGL.
    - RichardCA 3y ago
      CDE on Sun was a daily driver for my working life through the late 90's / early 2000's. KDE under Linux could be configured to have more or less the same UI semantics. That changed with KDE 4 and a lot of people rejected it. One would assume those people are the same ones who now use Trinity.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Xfce3 was like that but lighter.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  There are things that Motif got right and things that better be killed with fire. Things they got right: contrast. Shapes. I don’t need my glasses to use this stuff. Things they got wrong: over the top 3D look. Fonts are shit. Italics in menus? Ragged bitmap italics? Gotta be fucking kidding me.
- kickingvegas 3y ago
  Oof. IMHO back in the day all the Unix implementations of Motif were terribly clumsy. You know who did a really great, coherent implementation of Motif that had nothing to do with the Unix folks back then? GeoWorks for the PC. Go figure.
- nullc 3y ago
  Not just wasted resources, a lot of modern eye candy actually makes the computer harder to use. For example, the recent 'flat' appearances make selected, unselected, and entirely-non-button areas look almost indistinguishable! Or animations that cause visible slowness locally and make remote display over any media slower than tens of megabits per second unusable. A computer is a tool, most tools are not sleek, they have buttons and dohickies, sharp edges that do work, etc. There is nothing wrong with polishing something up, sure, but it has to be strictly secondary to usability. The high contrast 3d look in motif wasn't because its creators had bad taste. They may well have also had bad taste, but the appearance served a utilitarian purpose. :)
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    > Or animations that cause visible slowness locally and make remote display over any media slower than tens of megabits per second unusable. Hello, Firefox, I'm looking at you, especially during start-up. I don't know whose idea it was to "fade-in" the toolbars on start up, but I noticed that one right away, when firing it up over both x2go and (especially) X-over-SSH. Cute thing to do in the middle of a pandemic where everyone is using remote displays!
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >The X-Windows Disaster [...] >The Motif Self-Abuse Kit >X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn’t give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn’t speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn’t written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a “solution:” the Open Software Foundation’s Motif. >What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP’s circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. >Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it “Motif.” Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can’t compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform. >[...] X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly. [...] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.... >MOTIF ANGST PAGE >If you have any ANGSTFUL Motif code, comments, documentation, or resources, please share them with me! Here is some of the stronger stuff I've found. Note: this is only for official Open Software Foundation Motif inspired Angst. If you're experiencing TCL/Tk That Only Looks Like Motif But Doesn't Suck Angst, then you should stop whining and fix the problem yourself, if somebody else hasn't already. /* Note that the text callbacks are "weird" in that they expect values in the callback structure to be set inside the callback proc to determine what actions need to be taken after the callbackproc returns. In particular, the XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct's 'doit' slot is always set to True, and must be set to False if the callbackproc doesn't want the action to be taken. To do this, Set_Call_Data_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct() is called by Wcb_Meta_Callbackproc() after the callback lisp code is evaluated, and the values bound to these settable variables are set inside call_data.... Another inconsistency with the Text widget is that some callbacks on this widget return XmAnyCallbackStruct's (XmNactivateCallback, XmNfocusCallback, XmNvalueChangedCallback), whereas XmNlosingFocusCallback, XmNmodifyVerifyCallback, and XmNmotionVerifyCallback return XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct. In the code below, we look at the 'reason' slot of the call data, (which is present in both XmAnyCallbackStruct and in XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct) to determine the kind of callback that occured and we only bind the values that are appropriate for that kind of callback. Information about which slots are valid for particular callback was taken from the documentation on the XmText(3X) widget, and verified against the Motif 1.1 source -- this is valid for both XmText and XmTextField widgets... */ static LVAL s_CALLBACK_CUR_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_NEW_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_START_POS, s_CALLBACK_END_POS, s_CALLBACK_TEXT; static void Lexical_Bindings_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct(bindings_list, lexical_env, call_data, client_data) LVAL bindings_list; /* a list of symbols to which values from XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct are bound */ LVAL lexical_env; XtPointer call_data; LVAL client_data; /* XLTYPE_CALLBACKOBJ */ { extern LVAL true; register LVAL s_bindname; XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct* cd; /* How long can this go on???? */ } [...]
gamedna 3y ago
Motif was everywhere and it sucked. Sun/SGI/etc. SGI/IRIX unfortunately used it as the default, but you could change it fairly easily.
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  Solaris had OpenLook if I am not mistaken.
  - astura 3y ago
    The ones at my university lab had CDE.
pram 3y ago
This is a general problem with old OS nostalgia and most UNIX variants: there’s literally nothing interesting to do with most of them. Not only that, but what you can do is not radically different from how things are still done. I worked with stuff like AIX and Solaris for years but like why would I ever bother with them again. What am I going to do, install DB2 for fun?
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
  For some people that is their idea of fun. Myself I'd never put the effort in, but I have fond memories of telnetting into the Indigo my brother's college roommate had in their dorm room, so when people do this nostalgia retro stuff and post it on the web I enjoy browsing it for a bit.
  - l33tman 3y ago
    I think the point being that you can still telnet into someone's Linux box (if it runs telnet....) and it would look exactly the same as 25 years ago. I find it difficult to be nostalgic for something you not only recognize but recognize as clearly inferior. Though, I also have fond memories of a friend who had his private SGI workstation on his desk at my first work :)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  That depends on whether or not your a casual DB2 enthusiast who plays with it only when it's available, or if you're a hardcore DB2 enthusiast willing to restore an AS/400 just for the fun of it, really.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  AIX? You'll spend an hour or so to set up the network so it'd even boot. For the youth: The AIX machine I remember did not even boot without a proper network. They featured obscure key combos, a tiny LCD screen and even more obscure beep codes to let you configure the network parameters. Only then they would boot into a proper OS.
  - 3y ago
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> SGI hardware was beautiful What I remember most was the startup chime - in an era when piezo electric speakers would be the norm the SGI startup chime was incredibly rich and extravagant.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  Apparently they had lots and lots of noises that had to be turned off in university computer labs because it was so obnoxious. Like cliche hacker movie levels of noises but worse. I heard some stories as a student working in engineering IT.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > Like cliche hacker movie levels of noises but worse It kind of makes sense tho. Some people were making CGI for movies on SGI boxes. And naturally, some of the movies where SGI machines were involved ended up putting those machines in the movie itself: > Jurassic Park featured a lot of computer generated images and it was one of the first movies to show SGI computers on screen. http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/index.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/index.html So if the SGI computers made a lot of computer noises. Perhaps this helped inspire the portrayal of noisy computers in hacker movies.
  - hestefisk 3y ago
    True. At my comp sci department, we called the Onyx “the Hoover”.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  SGI boot chimes https://youtu.be/1zjuyLXsmew?t=30 https://youtu.be/1zjuyLXsmew?t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZLwZhmkW8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZLwZhmkW8Y
  - labcomputer 3y ago
    Sadly, I can’t find any videos with the alternate boot chimes (you could choose from 4 in the prom monitor) for the (purple) Indigo2.
housemusicfan 3y ago
IRIX was what an OS is supposed to look like: functional. In fact, things took a major turn for the worse when we pushed the engineers aside and let the avant-garde artists take over. What I do know is that children and smooth-brains alike in the 1990s could figure out Windows 9x and Mac OS 7 with little effort as "ugly" as they were. Even CDE, the ugliest girl in the village, was still usable. I have a genius-level IQ (it's been tested) and I cannot figure some of this new shit out. It's often poorly thought out and illogical. Modern OS design has turned into a virtual escape room, where the puzzle has now become accomplishing basic tasks but you get to take an acid trip with animations and hamburger buttons along the way.
Findecanor 3y ago
It had its own variant of Motif with a more stylish, polished look that made it stand out as being SGI and not just any Unix/X11 system.
ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. They were also insanely expensive, affordable to only the wealthiest of established companies. A basic SGI workstation would cost as much as a sports car, and professional workstation as much as a house. At those prices they had better damn be beautiful and well built. In the early '00s ugly beige boxes with Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs running BSD, Windows NT and Linux started wiping the floor with those beautiful SGI workstations at only a fraction of the price, that it made SGI basically irrelevant overnight. It was a bloodbath. The only market they held onto for a little while were supercomputers and compute workstations for wealthy customers that were running massive simulations like oil & gas for which money was no abject. The VFX team of the original Matrix movie from 1999 was grateful they could save huge amounts of time and money by running their rendering pipeline on networked commodity Dell workstations with off the shelf Intel CPUs.[1] That was one of the last nails in SGIs coffin. [1] "Manex Visual Effects used 32 Dell Precision 410 Dual P-II/450 Processor systems running FreeBSD as the core CG Render Farm. Charles Henrich, the senior systems administrator at Manex, says, "We came to a point in the production where we realized we just did not have enough computing power on our existing SGI infrastructure to get through the 3-D intensive sequences. It was at that point we decided on going with a FreeBSD based solution, due to the ability to get the hardware quickly as well as the reliability and ease of administration that FreeBSD provides us. Working with Dell, we purchased 32 of these systems on a Wednesday, and had them rendering in production by Saturday afternoon. It was truly an amazing effort on everyone’s part, and I don’t believe it would’ve been possible had we chosen to go with any other Operating System solution." https://www.freebsd.org/press/press-rel-1/ https://www.freebsd.org/press/press-rel-1/
- 1827163 3y ago
  You could get a whole network of PCs for the price of one workstation. And PCs had better development tools as well, such as IDEs.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  wow I never had a chance to know what pipeline was used. p-II/450 DELL feels so "average". I wonder what renderer they used ... bmrt ? renderman ? mentalray ?
jacquesm 3y ago
I actually loved IRIX for a couple of very simple reasons: it mostly got out of the way of the applications and it 'just worked', reliabily, month after month. After many years of using many IRIX boxes as workstations and as servers I realized we'd never seen a machine crash, uptimes were in the years unless we rebooted a machine on purpose. Very solid hardware, very solid software and for the times on the workstations amazing graphics. The lack of eye candy in the OS was an asset to me. I still set up my terminals the way the default terminal in IRIX looked because it feels like home to me. Linux has some of these properties today so that's what I'm using now.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >it 'just worked', reliabily, month after month. IRIX users would beg to differ. Towards the end of SGI's life, IRIX has a amassed a laundry list of bugs labeled critical that weren't getting fixed and the list was getting bigger, prompting many of the staff to leave SGI and many SGI customers to switch to BSD or Linux, further driving more nails into SGI's coffin.
  - efrecon 3y ago
    I actually don't, but I think this has to do with the generations of the hardware and software combo. Early stuff would typically be very stable. Towards the end of their gold era, SGI urge out new stuff and reliability went down.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Anything after 5.3 I missed because I had already seen the writing on the wall by then, so it may well be that both of these are true, but that we're talking about different times. Mine: 1995 until 2002 or so. Right about when they got VR crazy (a bit like what is happening with Facebook right now).
- Daub 3y ago
  IRIX also supported Photoshop natively.
Hatrix 3y ago
I had an SGI Indy for a while. The main thing I remember is the weight. Some of those old computers felt like they were full of lead.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  https://yarchive.net/risks/sgi_irix.html https://yarchive.net/risks/sgi_irix.html PERFORMANCE UPDATE "Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes "X and Motif are the reasons that UNIX deserves to die." -- Larry Kaplan >The performance story is just as bad. I was tempted to write simply, "Try to do some real work on a 16 megabyte Indy. Case closed.", but I'll include some details. >In May, I listed some unacceptable Motif performance measurements. Just before 5.1 MR, someone reran my tests and discovered that the performance had gotten even worse. Some effort was expended to tune the software so that instead of being intolerable, it was back to merely unacceptable performance. >We no longer report benchmark results on our standard system. The benchmarks are not done with the DSO libraries; they are all compiled non-DSO so that the performance in 5.1 has not declined too much. >Before I upgraded from 4.0.5 to the MR version of 5.1, I ran some timings of some everyday activities to see what would happen. These timings were all made with the wall clock, so they represent precisely what our users will see. I run a 32 megabyte R4000 Elan. Test 4.0.5 5.1 % change ---- ----- --- -------- C compile of a 25 sec 35 sec 40% small application C++ compile of a 68 sec 105 sec 54% small application Showcase startup, 13 sec 18 sec 38% May report file Start a shell <2 sec ~3 sec ~50% Jot 2 MB file <2 sec ~3 sec ~50% >What's most frightening about the 5.1 performance is that nobody knows exactly where it went. If you start asking around, you get plenty of finger-pointing and theories, but few facts. In the May report, I proposed a "5% theory", which states that each little thing we add (Motif, internationalization, drag-and-drop, DSOs, multiple fonts, and so on) costs roughly 5% of the machine. After 15 or 20 of these, most of the performance is gone. >Bloating by itself causes problems. There's heavy paging, there's so much code and it's so scattered that the cache may as well not be there. The window manager and X and Toto are so tangled that many minor operations like moving the mouse or deleting a file wake up all the processes on the machine, causing additional paging, and perhaps graphics context swaps. >But bloat isn't the whole story. Rocky Rhodes recently ran a small application on an Indy, and noticed that when he held the mouse button down and slid it back and forth across the menu bar, the (small) pop-up menus got as much as 25 seconds behind. He submitted a bug, which was dismissed as paging due to lack of memory. But Rocky was running with 160 megabytes of memory, so there was no paging. The problem turned out to be Motif code modified for the SGI look that is even more sluggish than regular Motif. Perhaps the problem is simply due to the huge number of context swaps necessary for all the daemons we're shipping. >The complexity of our system software has surpassed the ability of average SGI programmers to understand it. And perhaps not just average programmers. Get a room full of 10 of our best software people, and you'll get 10 different opinions of what's causing the lousy performance and bloat. What's wrong is that the software has simply become too complicated for anyone to understand.
weinzierl 3y ago
I don't remember if it was IRIX but from the SGI I worked on the one thing that left a lasting impression was the GUI. From what I remember it was a truly vector based UI where you could scale everything arbitrarily without ugly pixel artifacts. This, for me, was living in the future. I thought every system will be like that in a year or two. Also, while I did't witness it in person at that time my machine had this flashy mousepad that showed a impression of a video running in a window. That was outrageous. Admittedly the UI was a bit minimalist compared to flashy OS/2 but at least it had smooth lines compared to the 32x32 pixel icon charm.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  For many years I preferred the SGI 1600SW LCD as my monitor after being introduced to them at work. At the time, it was quite impressive (110dpi) and now is probably bested by a randomly-chosen $100 LCD at Microcenter.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
If it had a Reality Engine in it nobody was looking at fucking Motif for long, they were looking at dinosaurs or aliens. Unless they were in a dinosaur movie, and then they were looking at that bullshit 3D ux.
hulitu 3y ago
> While SGI boxes were beautiful And 30 years after them nobody is able to do something at least at the same level of design. Today the level is at "RGB LEDs and transparent case". Design has died.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  Before shitting too much on current workstation designs, check how much an SGI workstation would cost back then. Onyx started at 100k USD in 2000's money without adjusting for inflation. For that kind of cheese, they'd better be designed by Gucci.
  - efrecon 3y ago
    But an onyx wasn't really a "workstation" anymore. The one we had at work required a 3-phase plug to support all the rendering pipes. Mini-super-computer would probably best define it
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    I'd say it's more about fashion than cost. I bet Apple spends more on designing and manufacturing their computers than SGI spent on their moulded plastic trim, it's just that the fashion these days is incredibly boring and lacking in imagination. If you're building a PC at least you can still get some pretty creative custom case designs on AliExpress etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPF7Z7TLdsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPF7Z7TLdsk
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      The cost of an SGI wasn't the plastic trim. They were loaded with a lot of custom chips that were all relatively low production volume. Those components had a relatively high cost because of the production volume and then obviously a nice margin added on top. The plastic exterior was literally just decoration.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  it's more than that, digitalization means 'objects' taking space are a problem, macbookair/tablets and soon VR is the floor.
znpy 3y ago
I guess the boxes were compensating for the desktop ui, and according to your comments, they were successful :)
angrygoat 3y ago
We had a few ex-mining company workstations at the computer club at university – I remember that the metal security bar through the Indigo workstation could be pulled out and waved at one's fellow users, usually in good fun. :) They were fun machines to play around on; even when we first got them c ~ 1999 PCs with a graphics card were catching up, but there was just something solid about them. I miss those days of *NIX workstations.
tarsinge 3y ago
I was a kid in their prime but thanks to making-of, documentaries and magazines it’s so ingrained I still get the aura these machines and OS are above my poor consumer-grade 2023 laptop, and my work is toying compared to what real adults pros are doing on these, even though I’m near 40.
coldtea 3y ago
>While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated I only used IRIX-themed window managers in Linux, back in the 90s, but I absolutely love that clean look
agumonkey 3y ago
> While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2. That is true, and it gave a super confusion feeling about seeing stuff like Maya running on it, which was peak software IMO (I mean, algebra friendly reactive DAG based, complex geometry rendering, including near real time constrained physics simulation.. with server/client split and noob-moldable/scriptable UI). So even if the DE felt lagging, you never cared much.
tinus_hn 3y ago
The O2 actually came with a blow up model to play around with.
jasoneckert 3y ago
I loved both SGI hardware and IRIX itself. There was a tremendous amount of effort put in to make it a desktop-friendly UNIX, and it showed. Services (NFS, networking, web services, etc.) were easy to configure using desktop apps, and the locations of system and user files was more intuitive than SunOS or NeXTSTEP. SGI was my favourite UNIX until OS X, and I still have an SGI Fuel (with all the Nekochan extras) that I boot up each time I need a nostalgia kick: https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/IRIX.png https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/IRIX.png https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/SGIFuel.jpg https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/SGIFuel.jpg
oppositelock 3y ago
A completely disagree with you on IRIX. I'm biased, because I did work with IRIX at SGI and I did in fact touch some kernel code as well. What I miss from IRIX, that no other system has yet replicated: 1) Realtime mode. RTLinux doesn't count. In IRIX, you could run your own code at a higher priority than the scheduler itself (this was called hard realtime), and you'd give it time slices when you could, or a core or two. 2) Frame scheduling. When rendering 3D, you could have the scheduler connected to the monitor refresh rate to make you less likely to miss a frame boundary. Yes, Motif was very plain, and X11 was a hot mess to work with, but the thing had capabilities which are still hard to find.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- riceart 3y ago
  > What I miss from IRIX, that no other system has yet replicated: 1) Realtime mode. RTLinux doesn't count. FWIW, SGI didn't seem to agree. From SGI's own whitepaper: "In addition, REACT for Linux adds unique capabilities including sgi-shield and kbar that were not available on IRIX. The Linux based platform delivers better real-time performance than SGI Origin running IRIX with realtime extensions: 30µs guaranteed interrupt response time versus 50µs for Origin." https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/565/463/operating_system_extensions_for_dynamic_real_time_application.pdf https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/565/463/operating_syst... Without REACT extensions, Irix realtime facilities aren't any different than the scheduling policies of Linux (this is akin to bypassing the normal scheduler). https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/IRIX/man5/realtime.5.html https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/IRIX/man5/realtime.5.html. I have a soft spot for Irix from the early 90s, and it had some clever accomodations for the technology at the time, but things have moved on and advanced.
grumpyprole 3y ago
Irix had vector icons that could be dynamically scaled. At the time I thought it was much more futuristic than Windows.

by wenc 3y ago

SMP-UX 3y ago

I rather think Motif looks fine. People complain but eye candy is wasted resources.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
„The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted.
- SMP-UX 3y ago
  What I meant was that who wants 500 plus megs of RAM dedicated solely to transparency and pretty special effects on the desktop? Idiots that's who. Edit: You might not see the problem if you have a computer with 32 GB of RAM and I certainly do. However I like to ensure that responsiveness is first up. IRIX Motif is 2D accelerated and very snappy as it's multi threaded and designed for power users. I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. What I'm basically trying to say is that visual effects that aren't well designed aren't worth the resources they take up. Functionality over aesthetics any day.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    I‘d agree to that. Aesthetics need not be wasteful, minimalism can be beautiful if done right and be very efficient, as the whole APL ecosystem shows. Its just that Motif attempts neither baroque opulence nor restrained elegance, its just carelessly ugly, and that is a sin against life.
    - arp242 3y ago
      What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided. Or the divided opinions on various styles of music. etc. I personally don't care much for the Motif looks (although I've only used OpenMotif – I'm not sure how it compares to IRIX's implementation; from some quick screenshots I looked up it seems IRIX looked better) but describing it as objectively "ugly" or "a sin against life" is just wrong.
      - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
        > What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. No.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided Strongly divided, as to the strength of like or dislike, yes. But as for the split, it's pretentious architects and a handful of laymen outliers on one side, and billions of people on the other. And whenever people vote with their wallets (as tourists, or picking where to live, etc) they shit all over brutalist monstrocities.
        arp242 3y ago
        I've seen quite a few people defend brutalist architecture on HN, I'm not a fan of dismissing people's tastes as "pretentious". Plus some of those comments (which I can't be bothered to look up right now) have convinced me that the things people really hate is the worst of brutalism, rather than the concept as such (it's still not my favourite style, but overall less bad than I thought before). But we can use other examples – I don't really want to talk about brutalism as such – like metal music, or paintings from Picasso or Mondriaan, or the discussion about whether or not Alien is a good film that still holds up in 2023 from earlier this week, or any number of things.
  - brirec 3y ago
    Jesus, we’re still arguing about the merit of desktop composition after all these years? Do yourself a favor and try comparing the responsiveness and resource usage of, e.g., KDE Plasma with desktop composition off vs on. You’ll probably be really shocked when you see how much more CPU you need to do something as simple as scrolling a browser window. Really, try it. Any browser, scroll around on something and look at your CPU usage and the framerate of your screen. Or image editing — try panning around an image. Doesn’t matter what editor/viewer either, since they all have to draw on your X server. Even just moving windows around on top of one another — everything is just so much more efficient when you offload it to a hardware accelerator. Does it use more RAM? Yeah, a little, because the way it works is by keeping the entire contents of the windows in memory rather than culling anything that’s not exposed in front. It’s definitely not 500 MB more, though, and it definitely can (and does) take advantage of any dedicated VRAM available. And the trade off of being able to just dump a framebuffer to the viewport instead of repeatedly computing what’s been culled 60+ times a second is definitely worth it to me, but if you still prefer not using acceleration, there’s always the option to just not use it.
    - arp242 3y ago
      I didn't really see the previous poster mention desktop composition at all? What I have seen is many computers that seem to spend more time calculating various animations than actually animating stuff. When I worked in a computer shop years ago I often turned off animations and transparencies for people who came in with slow computers (XP, Vista, 7) and they were generally happy with the speed-up and didn't mind the lesser visuals at all.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      Which are the merits of desktop composition besides drawing the whole screen just to redraw the cursor ?
      - formerly_proven 3y ago
        Cursor ain't in the frame buffer, moving it around only triggers a render if an application rendered a change in response to the mouse move event.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    500 megs of RAM TCO is like a cup of coffee. I drink coffee every day. Would you say I "dedicate" that cup of coffee to myself?
  - jen20 3y ago
    I recall for many years running OSX on a PowerBook with 256MB RAM total, with no problems. That machine was in use until the switch to Intels. It was fine - indeed more responsive than most Windows machines laden with crapware that I encounter today with many times the resources.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    > I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. You're misattributing blame here. Aqua, Aero, and Metro were themselves just UI themes/design languages. They did not cause performance problems. To the underlying compositor it doesn't matter if a button is brightly colored beveled triangle or a flat rectangle. A 32x32px button is 1,024 pixels that need to be drawn to a buffer irrespective of what's in those pixels. The performance problems in those UIs were almost always related to the compositor and underlying hardware (or drivers for same). Without hardware accelerated drawing, even just 2D acceleration, the compositor was limited by the CPU and memory. The hardware limitations are only problematic at the margins though. At those various systems' introduction the performance issues were only at the low end. As the "low end" improved performance became a non-issue. Aero sucked when it was introduced because the 3D compositor was enabled on underpowered graphics hardware at the request of OEMs. Aqua ran great on then-new PowerMacs but sucked on the mobile graphics chips in iMacs and all the Mac notebooks of the time.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > „The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted. That's an extreme view; GP didn't indicate that all UI toolkits needed to resemble Motif. I mean, would it be fair to sum up your point as "Prisons are maximally efficient concrete boxes, all houses should be eye candy"? Motif is (was at the time) just one of a large number of GUI designs. I quite liked it myself at the time, too.
  - SMP-UX 3y ago
    More to the point I think effects are fine if they don't take up massive amounts of resources.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- forgotmypw17 3y ago
  The Cathedral should be beautiful. Residences are up for debate. Adding eye candy to a workbench or a toolbox is less than helpful, if you ask me.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    What grey and utilitarian relationship to the world. I, for one, am guided by the beauty of our weapons.
  - criddell 3y ago
    Donald Norman has studied this and concluded that attractive things work better. A beautiful UI is one you will want to work at and will inspire creativity and problem solving. It can make your work seem easier. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_Design_Attractive_Things_Work_Better https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_D...
    - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      thank god theres a study for that I was starting to think the greeks and romans had it all wrong and we could raze rome
forgotmypw17 3y ago
I agree, as far as my workstation goes, it's like putting eye candy on a hammer. I use this: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- heyoni 3y ago
  Or lipstick on a pig!
  - hulitu 3y ago
    There are a lot of pigs who wear lipstick, so i don't underestand what's wrong with it. /s
GauntletWizard 3y ago
Not-so-Common Desktop Environment is a modern attempt at the style. I don't end up using it, but it reminds me wonderfully of a time when computers were made by and for people. https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
- anthk 3y ago
  Uh, CDE was corporation-ware. The computers for the people and by the people used a hacked fvwm and rxvt making magic on Intel PC's with a Pentium I MMX /II running faster and snappier than even Irix and Sparc machines except for OpenGL.
  - RichardCA 3y ago
    CDE on Sun was a daily driver for my working life through the late 90's / early 2000's. KDE under Linux could be configured to have more or less the same UI semantics. That changed with KDE 4 and a lot of people rejected it. One would assume those people are the same ones who now use Trinity.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Xfce3 was like that but lighter.
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
There are things that Motif got right and things that better be killed with fire. Things they got right: contrast. Shapes. I don’t need my glasses to use this stuff. Things they got wrong: over the top 3D look. Fonts are shit. Italics in menus? Ragged bitmap italics? Gotta be fucking kidding me.
kickingvegas 3y ago
Oof. IMHO back in the day all the Unix implementations of Motif were terribly clumsy. You know who did a really great, coherent implementation of Motif that had nothing to do with the Unix folks back then? GeoWorks for the PC. Go figure.
nullc 3y ago
Not just wasted resources, a lot of modern eye candy actually makes the computer harder to use. For example, the recent 'flat' appearances make selected, unselected, and entirely-non-button areas look almost indistinguishable! Or animations that cause visible slowness locally and make remote display over any media slower than tens of megabits per second unusable. A computer is a tool, most tools are not sleek, they have buttons and dohickies, sharp edges that do work, etc. There is nothing wrong with polishing something up, sure, but it has to be strictly secondary to usability. The high contrast 3d look in motif wasn't because its creators had bad taste. They may well have also had bad taste, but the appearance served a utilitarian purpose. :)
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > Or animations that cause visible slowness locally and make remote display over any media slower than tens of megabits per second unusable. Hello, Firefox, I'm looking at you, especially during start-up. I don't know whose idea it was to "fade-in" the toolbars on start up, but I noticed that one right away, when firing it up over both x2go and (especially) X-over-SSH. Cute thing to do in the middle of a pandemic where everyone is using remote displays!
DonHopkins 3y ago
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >The X-Windows Disaster [...] >The Motif Self-Abuse Kit >X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn’t give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn’t speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn’t written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a “solution:” the Open Software Foundation’s Motif. >What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP’s circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. >Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it “Motif.” Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can’t compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform. >[...] X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly. [...] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.... >MOTIF ANGST PAGE >If you have any ANGSTFUL Motif code, comments, documentation, or resources, please share them with me! Here is some of the stronger stuff I've found. Note: this is only for official Open Software Foundation Motif inspired Angst. If you're experiencing TCL/Tk That Only Looks Like Motif But Doesn't Suck Angst, then you should stop whining and fix the problem yourself, if somebody else hasn't already. /* Note that the text callbacks are "weird" in that they expect values in the callback structure to be set inside the callback proc to determine what actions need to be taken after the callbackproc returns. In particular, the XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct's 'doit' slot is always set to True, and must be set to False if the callbackproc doesn't want the action to be taken. To do this, Set_Call_Data_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct() is called by Wcb_Meta_Callbackproc() after the callback lisp code is evaluated, and the values bound to these settable variables are set inside call_data.... Another inconsistency with the Text widget is that some callbacks on this widget return XmAnyCallbackStruct's (XmNactivateCallback, XmNfocusCallback, XmNvalueChangedCallback), whereas XmNlosingFocusCallback, XmNmodifyVerifyCallback, and XmNmotionVerifyCallback return XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct. In the code below, we look at the 'reason' slot of the call data, (which is present in both XmAnyCallbackStruct and in XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct) to determine the kind of callback that occured and we only bind the values that are appropriate for that kind of callback. Information about which slots are valid for particular callback was taken from the documentation on the XmText(3X) widget, and verified against the Motif 1.1 source -- this is valid for both XmText and XmTextField widgets... */ static LVAL s_CALLBACK_CUR_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_NEW_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_START_POS, s_CALLBACK_END_POS, s_CALLBACK_TEXT; static void Lexical_Bindings_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct(bindings_list, lexical_env, call_data, client_data) LVAL bindings_list; /* a list of symbols to which values from XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct are bound */ LVAL lexical_env; XtPointer call_data; LVAL client_data; /* XLTYPE_CALLBACKOBJ */ { extern LVAL true; register LVAL s_bindname; XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct* cd; /* How long can this go on???? */ } [...]

gamedna 3y ago

Motif was everywhere and it sucked. Sun/SGI/etc. SGI/IRIX unfortunately used it as the default, but you could change it fairly easily.

ofrzeta 3y ago
Solaris had OpenLook if I am not mistaken.
- astura 3y ago
  The ones at my university lab had CDE.

pram 3y ago

This is a general problem with old OS nostalgia and most UNIX variants: there’s literally nothing interesting to do with most of them. Not only that, but what you can do is not radically different from how things are still done. I worked with stuff like AIX and Solaris for years but like why would I ever bother with them again. What am I going to do, install DB2 for fun?

jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
For some people that is their idea of fun. Myself I'd never put the effort in, but I have fond memories of telnetting into the Indigo my brother's college roommate had in their dorm room, so when people do this nostalgia retro stuff and post it on the web I enjoy browsing it for a bit.
- l33tman 3y ago
  I think the point being that you can still telnet into someone's Linux box (if it runs telnet....) and it would look exactly the same as 25 years ago. I find it difficult to be nostalgic for something you not only recognize but recognize as clearly inferior. Though, I also have fond memories of a friend who had his private SGI workstation on his desk at my first work :)
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
That depends on whether or not your a casual DB2 enthusiast who plays with it only when it's available, or if you're a hardcore DB2 enthusiast willing to restore an AS/400 just for the fun of it, really.
weinzierl 3y ago
AIX? You'll spend an hour or so to set up the network so it'd even boot. For the youth: The AIX machine I remember did not even boot without a proper network. They featured obscure key combos, a tiny LCD screen and even more obscure beep codes to let you configure the network parameters. Only then they would boot into a proper OS.
- 3y ago

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

> SGI hardware was beautiful What I remember most was the startup chime - in an era when piezo electric speakers would be the norm the SGI startup chime was incredibly rich and extravagant.

colechristensen 3y ago
Apparently they had lots and lots of noises that had to be turned off in university computer labs because it was so obnoxious. Like cliche hacker movie levels of noises but worse. I heard some stories as a student working in engineering IT.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > Like cliche hacker movie levels of noises but worse It kind of makes sense tho. Some people were making CGI for movies on SGI boxes. And naturally, some of the movies where SGI machines were involved ended up putting those machines in the movie itself: > Jurassic Park featured a lot of computer generated images and it was one of the first movies to show SGI computers on screen. http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/index.html http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/index.html So if the SGI computers made a lot of computer noises. Perhaps this helped inspire the portrayal of noisy computers in hacker movies.
- hestefisk 3y ago
  True. At my comp sci department, we called the Onyx “the Hoover”.
fsckboy 3y ago
SGI boot chimes https://youtu.be/1zjuyLXsmew?t=30 https://youtu.be/1zjuyLXsmew?t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZLwZhmkW8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZLwZhmkW8Y
- labcomputer 3y ago
  Sadly, I can’t find any videos with the alternate boot chimes (you could choose from 4 in the prom monitor) for the (purple) Indigo2.

housemusicfan 3y ago

IRIX was what an OS is supposed to look like: functional. In fact, things took a major turn for the worse when we pushed the engineers aside and let the avant-garde artists take over. What I do know is that children and smooth-brains alike in the 1990s could figure out Windows 9x and Mac OS 7 with little effort as "ugly" as they were. Even CDE, the ugliest girl in the village, was still usable. I have a genius-level IQ (it's been tested) and I cannot figure some of this new shit out. It's often poorly thought out and illogical. Modern OS design has turned into a virtual escape room, where the puzzle has now become accomplishing basic tasks but you get to take an acid trip with animations and hamburger buttons along the way.

Findecanor 3y ago

It had its own variant of Motif with a more stylish, polished look that made it stand out as being SGI and not just any Unix/X11 system.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago

>SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. They were also insanely expensive, affordable to only the wealthiest of established companies. A basic SGI workstation would cost as much as a sports car, and professional workstation as much as a house. At those prices they had better damn be beautiful and well built. In the early '00s ugly beige boxes with Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs running BSD, Windows NT and Linux started wiping the floor with those beautiful SGI workstations at only a fraction of the price, that it made SGI basically irrelevant overnight. It was a bloodbath. The only market they held onto for a little while were supercomputers and compute workstations for wealthy customers that were running massive simulations like oil & gas for which money was no abject. The VFX team of the original Matrix movie from 1999 was grateful they could save huge amounts of time and money by running their rendering pipeline on networked commodity Dell workstations with off the shelf Intel CPUs.[1] That was one of the last nails in SGIs coffin. [1] "Manex Visual Effects used 32 Dell Precision 410 Dual P-II/450 Processor systems running FreeBSD as the core CG Render Farm. Charles Henrich, the senior systems administrator at Manex, says, "We came to a point in the production where we realized we just did not have enough computing power on our existing SGI infrastructure to get through the 3-D intensive sequences. It was at that point we decided on going with a FreeBSD based solution, due to the ability to get the hardware quickly as well as the reliability and ease of administration that FreeBSD provides us. Working with Dell, we purchased 32 of these systems on a Wednesday, and had them rendering in production by Saturday afternoon. It was truly an amazing effort on everyone’s part, and I don’t believe it would’ve been possible had we chosen to go with any other Operating System solution." https://www.freebsd.org/press/press-rel-1/ https://www.freebsd.org/press/press-rel-1/

1827163 3y ago
You could get a whole network of PCs for the price of one workstation. And PCs had better development tools as well, such as IDEs.
agumonkey 3y ago
wow I never had a chance to know what pipeline was used. p-II/450 DELL feels so "average". I wonder what renderer they used ... bmrt ? renderman ? mentalray ?

jacquesm 3y ago

I actually loved IRIX for a couple of very simple reasons: it mostly got out of the way of the applications and it 'just worked', reliabily, month after month. After many years of using many IRIX boxes as workstations and as servers I realized we'd never seen a machine crash, uptimes were in the years unless we rebooted a machine on purpose. Very solid hardware, very solid software and for the times on the workstations amazing graphics. The lack of eye candy in the OS was an asset to me. I still set up my terminals the way the default terminal in IRIX looked because it feels like home to me. Linux has some of these properties today so that's what I'm using now.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>it 'just worked', reliabily, month after month. IRIX users would beg to differ. Towards the end of SGI's life, IRIX has a amassed a laundry list of bugs labeled critical that weren't getting fixed and the list was getting bigger, prompting many of the staff to leave SGI and many SGI customers to switch to BSD or Linux, further driving more nails into SGI's coffin.
- efrecon 3y ago
  I actually don't, but I think this has to do with the generations of the hardware and software combo. Early stuff would typically be very stable. Towards the end of their gold era, SGI urge out new stuff and reliability went down.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Anything after 5.3 I missed because I had already seen the writing on the wall by then, so it may well be that both of these are true, but that we're talking about different times. Mine: 1995 until 2002 or so. Right about when they got VR crazy (a bit like what is happening with Facebook right now).
Daub 3y ago
IRIX also supported Photoshop natively.

Hatrix 3y ago

I had an SGI Indy for a while. The main thing I remember is the weight. Some of those old computers felt like they were full of lead.

DonHopkins 3y ago
https://yarchive.net/risks/sgi_irix.html https://yarchive.net/risks/sgi_irix.html PERFORMANCE UPDATE "Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes "X and Motif are the reasons that UNIX deserves to die." -- Larry Kaplan >The performance story is just as bad. I was tempted to write simply, "Try to do some real work on a 16 megabyte Indy. Case closed.", but I'll include some details. >In May, I listed some unacceptable Motif performance measurements. Just before 5.1 MR, someone reran my tests and discovered that the performance had gotten even worse. Some effort was expended to tune the software so that instead of being intolerable, it was back to merely unacceptable performance. >We no longer report benchmark results on our standard system. The benchmarks are not done with the DSO libraries; they are all compiled non-DSO so that the performance in 5.1 has not declined too much. >Before I upgraded from 4.0.5 to the MR version of 5.1, I ran some timings of some everyday activities to see what would happen. These timings were all made with the wall clock, so they represent precisely what our users will see. I run a 32 megabyte R4000 Elan. Test 4.0.5 5.1 % change ---- ----- --- -------- C compile of a 25 sec 35 sec 40% small application C++ compile of a 68 sec 105 sec 54% small application Showcase startup, 13 sec 18 sec 38% May report file Start a shell <2 sec ~3 sec ~50% Jot 2 MB file <2 sec ~3 sec ~50% >What's most frightening about the 5.1 performance is that nobody knows exactly where it went. If you start asking around, you get plenty of finger-pointing and theories, but few facts. In the May report, I proposed a "5% theory", which states that each little thing we add (Motif, internationalization, drag-and-drop, DSOs, multiple fonts, and so on) costs roughly 5% of the machine. After 15 or 20 of these, most of the performance is gone. >Bloating by itself causes problems. There's heavy paging, there's so much code and it's so scattered that the cache may as well not be there. The window manager and X and Toto are so tangled that many minor operations like moving the mouse or deleting a file wake up all the processes on the machine, causing additional paging, and perhaps graphics context swaps. >But bloat isn't the whole story. Rocky Rhodes recently ran a small application on an Indy, and noticed that when he held the mouse button down and slid it back and forth across the menu bar, the (small) pop-up menus got as much as 25 seconds behind. He submitted a bug, which was dismissed as paging due to lack of memory. But Rocky was running with 160 megabytes of memory, so there was no paging. The problem turned out to be Motif code modified for the SGI look that is even more sluggish than regular Motif. Perhaps the problem is simply due to the huge number of context swaps necessary for all the daemons we're shipping. >The complexity of our system software has surpassed the ability of average SGI programmers to understand it. And perhaps not just average programmers. Get a room full of 10 of our best software people, and you'll get 10 different opinions of what's causing the lousy performance and bloat. What's wrong is that the software has simply become too complicated for anyone to understand.

weinzierl 3y ago

I don't remember if it was IRIX but from the SGI I worked on the one thing that left a lasting impression was the GUI. From what I remember it was a truly vector based UI where you could scale everything arbitrarily without ugly pixel artifacts. This, for me, was living in the future. I thought every system will be like that in a year or two. Also, while I did't witness it in person at that time my machine had this flashy mousepad that showed a impression of a video running in a window. That was outrageous. Admittedly the UI was a bit minimalist compared to flashy OS/2 but at least it had smooth lines compared to the 32x32 pixel icon charm.

sokoloff 3y ago
For many years I preferred the SGI 1600SW LCD as my monitor after being introduced to them at work. At the time, it was quite impressive (110dpi) and now is probably bested by a randomly-chosen $100 LCD at Microcenter.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

If it had a Reality Engine in it nobody was looking at fucking Motif for long, they were looking at dinosaurs or aliens. Unless they were in a dinosaur movie, and then they were looking at that bullshit 3D ux.

hulitu 3y ago

> While SGI boxes were beautiful And 30 years after them nobody is able to do something at least at the same level of design. Today the level is at "RGB LEDs and transparent case". Design has died.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
Before shitting too much on current workstation designs, check how much an SGI workstation would cost back then. Onyx started at 100k USD in 2000's money without adjusting for inflation. For that kind of cheese, they'd better be designed by Gucci.
- efrecon 3y ago
  But an onyx wasn't really a "workstation" anymore. The one we had at work required a 3-phase plug to support all the rendering pipes. Mini-super-computer would probably best define it
- kalleboo 3y ago
  I'd say it's more about fashion than cost. I bet Apple spends more on designing and manufacturing their computers than SGI spent on their moulded plastic trim, it's just that the fashion these days is incredibly boring and lacking in imagination. If you're building a PC at least you can still get some pretty creative custom case designs on AliExpress etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPF7Z7TLdsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPF7Z7TLdsk
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    The cost of an SGI wasn't the plastic trim. They were loaded with a lot of custom chips that were all relatively low production volume. Those components had a relatively high cost because of the production volume and then obviously a nice margin added on top. The plastic exterior was literally just decoration.
agumonkey 3y ago
it's more than that, digitalization means 'objects' taking space are a problem, macbookair/tablets and soon VR is the floor.

znpy 3y ago

I guess the boxes were compensating for the desktop ui, and according to your comments, they were successful :)

angrygoat 3y ago

We had a few ex-mining company workstations at the computer club at university – I remember that the metal security bar through the Indigo workstation could be pulled out and waved at one's fellow users, usually in good fun. :) They were fun machines to play around on; even when we first got them c ~ 1999 PCs with a graphics card were catching up, but there was just something solid about them. I miss those days of *NIX workstations.

tarsinge 3y ago

I was a kid in their prime but thanks to making-of, documentaries and magazines it’s so ingrained I still get the aura these machines and OS are above my poor consumer-grade 2023 laptop, and my work is toying compared to what real adults pros are doing on these, even though I’m near 40.

coldtea 3y ago

>While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated I only used IRIX-themed window managers in Linux, back in the 90s, but I absolutely love that clean look

agumonkey 3y ago

> While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2. That is true, and it gave a super confusion feeling about seeing stuff like Maya running on it, which was peak software IMO (I mean, algebra friendly reactive DAG based, complex geometry rendering, including near real time constrained physics simulation.. with server/client split and noob-moldable/scriptable UI). So even if the DE felt lagging, you never cared much.

tinus_hn 3y ago

The O2 actually came with a blow up model to play around with.

jasoneckert 3y ago

I loved both SGI hardware and IRIX itself. There was a tremendous amount of effort put in to make it a desktop-friendly UNIX, and it showed. Services (NFS, networking, web services, etc.) were easy to configure using desktop apps, and the locations of system and user files was more intuitive than SunOS or NeXTSTEP. SGI was my favourite UNIX until OS X, and I still have an SGI Fuel (with all the Nekochan extras) that I boot up each time I need a nostalgia kick: https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/IRIX.png https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/IRIX.png https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/SGIFuel.jpg https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/SGIFuel.jpg

oppositelock 3y ago

A completely disagree with you on IRIX. I'm biased, because I did work with IRIX at SGI and I did in fact touch some kernel code as well. What I miss from IRIX, that no other system has yet replicated: 1) Realtime mode. RTLinux doesn't count. In IRIX, you could run your own code at a higher priority than the scheduler itself (this was called hard realtime), and you'd give it time slices when you could, or a core or two. 2) Frame scheduling. When rendering 3D, you could have the scheduler connected to the monitor refresh rate to make you less likely to miss a frame boundary. Yes, Motif was very plain, and X11 was a hot mess to work with, but the thing had capabilities which are still hard to find.

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riceart 3y ago
> What I miss from IRIX, that no other system has yet replicated: 1) Realtime mode. RTLinux doesn't count. FWIW, SGI didn't seem to agree. From SGI's own whitepaper: "In addition, REACT for Linux adds unique capabilities including sgi-shield and kbar that were not available on IRIX. The Linux based platform delivers better real-time performance than SGI Origin running IRIX with realtime extensions: 30µs guaranteed interrupt response time versus 50µs for Origin." https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/565/463/operating_system_extensions_for_dynamic_real_time_application.pdf https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/565/463/operating_syst... Without REACT extensions, Irix realtime facilities aren't any different than the scheduling policies of Linux (this is akin to bypassing the normal scheduler). https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/IRIX/man5/realtime.5.html https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/IRIX/man5/realtime.5.html. I have a soft spot for Irix from the early 90s, and it had some clever accomodations for the technology at the time, but things have moved on and advanced.

grumpyprole 3y ago

Irix had vector icons that could be dynamically scaled. At the time I thought it was much more futuristic than Windows.