2 ms·
These machines were beautiful. In my first company, a small CGI/video production firm, we had an SGI Indigo High Impact and two DEC Alphas, the rest was PCs. T
by virtualritz 3y ago
These machines were beautiful. In my first company, a small CGI/video production firm, we had an SGI Indigo High Impact and two DEC Alphas, the rest was PCs.
The Alphas ran Windows NT.
They were about twice as fast as the fastest PCs at the time when we rendered with PhotoRealistic RenderMan for Windows and Real3D on them.
FX!32 was a thing of beauty. [1]
Basically Apple's Rosetta but decades earlier.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
- unnah 3y agoIt was not quite decades in advance. Although a version of FX!32 was demoed in 1993, the first production version was released in 1996. Apple's Power Macintosh already included a 68k emulator in 1994, and by 1998 it featured just-in-time binary translation like FX!32: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator
- hinkley 3y agoI ended up with one of two Alphas donated by Digital to ensure our software ran on their hardware. I was trucking along with that box while coworkers were running Intel cpus twice as fast before I started noticing the deficiency. Ultimately I let it go to participate in late night multiplayer gaming, not because the machine was particularly wrong.