SGI Indigo2: An $86, 000 Workstation from 1995
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Chance
God I loved old SGIs. Worked developing engineering software on them. Great OS which was years ahead of its time. My old 150MHz Indigo could do video editing and real-time 3D rendering when most people were wowed by windows 3. 1. The O2 was unreal at modelling and the Indy had video conferencing in 1995, when most people though a 33kbps modem connection to a bulletin board was cutting edge. The Octanes were beasts and we all lived in awe of the Origins and Onyxes.
Great compilers for development, great software tools for creativity and built-in web development software from the early 1990s.
Built like tanks, too.
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God I loved old SGIs. Worked developing engineering software on them. Great OS which was years ahead of its time. My old 150MHz Indigo could do video editing and real-time 3D rendering when most people were wowed by windows 3. 1. The O2 was unreal at modelling and the Indy had video conferencing in 1995, when most people though a 33kbps modem connection to a bulletin board was cutting edge. The Octanes were beasts and we all lived in awe of the Origins and Onyxes.
Great compilers for development, great software tools for creativity and built-in web development software from the early 1990s.
Built like tanks, too.
reply
RWZiggy
Yet the rise of Linux and 3D graphics for PCs pretty quickly killed these things, a few years later I bought an Indigo2 Impact (not max) for $300 on ebay with no disks, added a random scsi CDROM and disk drive myself and installed IRIX, made a custom video plug to use it with more ordinary monitor (Impact was sync on green. Since I had the CADD wares, C development, and was IRIX admin I could do things with it. I really don't see what someone could do with one now, to be honest. You could have most of the same fun now with Linux or one of BSD with x86-64 or ARM (e. g. Raspberry Pi)
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Yet the rise of Linux and 3D graphics for PCs pretty quickly killed these things, a few years later I bought an Indigo2 Impact (not max) for $300 on ebay with no disks, added a random scsi CDROM and disk drive myself and installed IRIX, made a custom video plug to use it with more ordinary monitor (Impact was sync on green. Since I had the CADD wares, C development, and was IRIX admin I could do things with it. I really don't see what someone could do with one now, to be honest. You could have most of the same fun now with Linux or one of BSD with x86-64 or ARM (e. g. Raspberry Pi)
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Yarnosh
Back in the day it bothered me that they could never bring together the more polished interfaces of Windows and MacOS with the high end workstations of the time. THose SGI machine had god awful X11 interfaces but they were rock solid. It is no wonder Microsoft eventually dominated for workstations when PC hardware finally caught up (primarily driven by gaming. If only SGI had put more work into the UI toolkit. But this is what you get when your dev staff is primarily engineers. It's like the early web before designers got involved. Programmers suck at user interface design.
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Back in the day it bothered me that they could never bring together the more polished interfaces of Windows and MacOS with the high end workstations of the time. THose SGI machine had god awful X11 interfaces but they were rock solid. It is no wonder Microsoft eventually dominated for workstations when PC hardware finally caught up (primarily driven by gaming. If only SGI had put more work into the UI toolkit. But this is what you get when your dev staff is primarily engineers. It's like the early web before designers got involved. Programmers suck at user interface design.
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Keith
Some years late to the party. But, your shirt makes me want to save an alien world and let my cube-headed buddy carry me away on a dragon. It also makes me want to own the same shirt for the simple pleasure of being identified by other souls who have been broken on the wheel of scientific adventure. I could even say your shirt is Out Of This World. It gives me a Flashback. A real Quest For Identity. I save the world, and Fade To Black. Another adventure, another time.
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Some years late to the party. But, your shirt makes me want to save an alien world and let my cube-headed buddy carry me away on a dragon. It also makes me want to own the same shirt for the simple pleasure of being identified by other souls who have been broken on the wheel of scientific adventure. I could even say your shirt is Out Of This World. It gives me a Flashback. A real Quest For Identity. I save the world, and Fade To Black. Another adventure, another time.
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juvandy
This brought back memories for me. In the early 90s my dad got a job teaching drafting at the local vocational school, and he convinced them that CAD was the way to teach rather than drafting by hand. Overnight, they managed to swap out the teaching lab from drafting tables to drafting computers, and he somehow even conned them into buying an Indigo-1. I was still in elementary school, but I think I ended up spending more time on it than anyone else.
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This brought back memories for me. In the early 90s my dad got a job teaching drafting at the local vocational school, and he convinced them that CAD was the way to teach rather than drafting by hand. Overnight, they managed to swap out the teaching lab from drafting tables to drafting computers, and he somehow even conned them into buying an Indigo-1. I was still in elementary school, but I think I ended up spending more time on it than anyone else.
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James
I bought the basic SGI O2 a few months back because I've always wanted to own an SGI ever since I could read (mid to late 90s. Only to learn from my dad a month later that when he was still working in the automotive industry (Chrysler specifically) they used SGI for AutoCAD and had he'd known I wanted one for so long he would have saved me one. I'm talking about the Octane line and a two racks of the servers.
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I bought the basic SGI O2 a few months back because I've always wanted to own an SGI ever since I could read (mid to late 90s. Only to learn from my dad a month later that when he was still working in the automotive industry (Chrysler specifically) they used SGI for AutoCAD and had he'd known I wanted one for so long he would have saved me one. I'm talking about the Octane line and a two racks of the servers.
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Beno
I can't even describe the buzz I had each time I looked at my Indigo 2. No other computer or any thing, ever, would ever give me this fuzzy feeling I'd get after pressing on the power button hidden behind the hinged front cover. Seeing the SGI reflective chrome logo spinning on the screen and working with Wavefront Explore and Alias Power Animator was the closest I got to experiencing real world magic!
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I can't even describe the buzz I had each time I looked at my Indigo 2. No other computer or any thing, ever, would ever give me this fuzzy feeling I'd get after pressing on the power button hidden behind the hinged front cover. Seeing the SGI reflective chrome logo spinning on the screen and working with Wavefront Explore and Alias Power Animator was the closest I got to experiencing real world magic!
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Ofn
1GB of RAM in those days was a lot. My pc had 256MB of RAM and cost us about 800 British pounds at the time (1999 ish) which is probably like 1200 pounds today. I still can't fathom that the medium quality pc I just built has 16GB RAM. When I was a kid that would have been a dream machine super computer from an H. G. Wells Sci Fi novel.
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1GB of RAM in those days was a lot. My pc had 256MB of RAM and cost us about 800 British pounds at the time (1999 ish) which is probably like 1200 pounds today. I still can't fathom that the medium quality pc I just built has 16GB RAM. When I was a kid that would have been a dream machine super computer from an H. G. Wells Sci Fi novel.
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Ashley
Last year I saw a video where someone demoed Blender 1. 0 which requires irix. He didn't have one of these so he emulated it with mame. I think he got around 1/3 the performance of one of these. lol and even then he couldn't render anything because whatever hardware blender needed for rendering wasn't supported in mame. lol
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Last year I saw a video where someone demoed Blender 1. 0 which requires irix. He didn't have one of these so he emulated it with mame. I think he got around 1/3 the performance of one of these. lol and even then he couldn't render anything because whatever hardware blender needed for rendering wasn't supported in mame. lol
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World
Unix huh? - I wonder if anyone has gotten a version of Linux to work on it.
I figure Linux might have an ever so slightly higher chance of compatibility with some more games.
Though I guess it would be a shame to use anything but the intented OS on it. Especially if it comes with a -_3D File Browser! _-
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Unix huh? - I wonder if anyone has gotten a version of Linux to work on it.
I figure Linux might have an ever so slightly higher chance of compatibility with some more games.
Though I guess it would be a shame to use anything but the intented OS on it. Especially if it comes with a -_3D File Browser! _-
reply
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