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The SGI Buyer's Guide (2003)
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago(2003) I started checking after it said "these systems are six years old". Yeah, it's been a bit longer than that...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ChickeNES 4mo agoI used to dream of owning an O2, in no small part due to it being the host of Erwin from UserFriendly. And then I managed to score multiple out of the trash years later in college, funny how the world works. :)
- mrcwinn 4mo agoWhen I was a teenager my dad brought me to the 7th floor of the Daily News building in Philly. This floor was a kind of skunk labs - tasked with digitizing the paper for their new “website.” This experience brought a couple of firsts: My first time using the internet on a screaming fast, dedicated T1 line. Unbelievable to see Netscape load a site so quickly. And: my first time seeing an SGI Indy. A row of them, in fact. This set off a fascination with operating systems outside System 7. I was so excited to get my hands on MkLinux, BeOS and later Rhapsody/OS X developer preview.
- angry_octet 4mo agoI remember watching a space shuttle launch live on the MBONE (multicast backbone) on one of the Indigo2 machines in the mech eng CAD lab. At the time the Australian internet uplink to the US terminated in the basement of that building. It took so long for home internet to catch up with that experience.
- angry_octet 4mo agoAnd yeah, burnt a bunch of time on MkLinux and NetBSD on 64030 trying to achieve home Unix.
- ofrzeta 4mo agoAlthough it is stupid I can't stop searching Ebay for SGI machines. I have fond memories of running an Indy on my desktop and operating some Onyx machines. Now they are overpriced and it really doesn't make much sense to own one, apart from maybe the latest Origin 2 with R12000 but even this in the end would only catch dust. Even the best Buttonfly demos on the latest and greatest machines get a bit tired after a while.
- kev009 4mo agoOnce upon a time this stuff was so cheap, a little later than the (2003), because IRIX was discontinued and nobody knew what to do with all of the surplus. Something like a Tezro was always a little pricey and filled a permanent niche, but I got tons of Origin 300s and stuff like that without thinking much about it at the time. I've got the Router rack and several IR3/IR4 bricks. LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration.
- st_goliath 4mo ago> LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration. Doesn't that kind of completely miss the entire point of the hobby? Like attending an online language class in your spare time and then just using deepl in a separate tab?
- kev009 4mo agoDepends what you are trying to do and what is fun to you. Artisanal assembly on an 8-bitter can be therapeutic. I'm quite happy to let Claude rip through radare2 and ghidra de-compilations without understanding the intermediate steps.
- aa-jv 4mo agoThere are plenty of great things to run on old SGI hardware that are still quite fun - Tranquility, Mekton, all the 3D apps you can find, flightsim, etc.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoI wish SGI would return and make a laptop.
- wazoox 4mo agoLike the Indy laptop in the "Congo" movie ? :)
- infl8ed 4mo agoHadn't really heard of SGI too much, going down the rabbit hole I thought this snippet from the Wikipedia page was especially interesting "For eight consecutive years (1995–2002), all films nominated for an Academy Award for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects were created on Silicon Graphics computer systems" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Entertainment_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Entertainment...
- Daub 4mo agoit is a little known fact that there was a version of Photoshop made for SGI's Irix.
- aa-jv 4mo agoThe Windows emulator is pretty fun too ..
- sillywalk 4mo agoIt was ported from the Mac version, along with Illustrator, using a set of libraries called Lattitude that implimented the Mac toolbox on Unix systems. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Jun97FactoryFloor/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...
- wazoox 4mo agoI've got a beefy Octane (4GB of RAM! dual R12000! MXE graphics!) but I honestly don't do much... At a time I used it as an X11 terminal but it's a bit too hot and loud even for that :)
- aa-jv 4mo agoTranquility, Mekton, ElectroGig:3DGO, Maya, Lightwave .. so many fun toys to play with on Octane if you've got the gumption ..
- wazoox 4mo agoMy favourite game back then was "Certain Impact", but AFAIK it only runs on IRIX 5.3 (probably uses COFF binaries?), on Indigo2 High Impact with TRAM or Extreme Impact with TRAM.
- aa-jv 4mo agoOoh yes, that is a great arcade-style flight sim, if I remember correctly. Worth keeping a machine around just for that! ;)
- harrouet 4mo agoI am old enough to have ben in business when SGI were a thing. The one thing I remember is that with the UMA arch, the memory was at the center of the design, not the CPU. Not unlike Apple Silicon...
- zvr 4mo agoThey definitely also had NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access): on multi-CPU systems, you had a variety of ways to specify where you wanted your data to live (stay close to one CPU, for example).