SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993

[Homer J Simpson]

[timgiles]

I remember playing some sort of tank sim :-) on these at Lilly Research labs in Sunninghill in the UK during my work experience.

[nctnico]

Can someone send some ESD grounding straps and mats to this guy?

[linux-works]

I was at SGI in the late 90's (mtn view campus, what is now google campus).

it was a fun place to work, great people, fun area.  unix was still king.

then, NT came along, SGI lost its way, stumbled and then became irrelevant ;(

for a while, SGI and cray merged.  you could sometimes get access to a cray if you asked nicely.

[edy]

I remember using one of these in the 90's at University. I was working in a chemistry laboratory and had to write some software directly for X-Windows!!!! Wow, brings back memories!!!! My software allowed you to import a stereo-scopic image (side-by-side) from a magazine article and trace each molecule backbone (LEFT and RIGHT) separately.... indicating corresponding points on each image. Then it would (by the use of parallax) re-create the 3D structure of the molecule, and then you would be able to rotate it and view it. It was a way to "reverse engineer" the stereo-image from other researchers. Hehe... Like these:



I think we used these workstations though. It was awesome at the time compared to my home computer. Probably also cost a fortune even though it was a "low end" machine:

[xrunner]

We had a bunch of SGIs where I worked, I still have one of their screwdrivers and it has a part number LOL.

[linux-works]

sometimes customers called in about 'infinite reality' (a product series), but they pronounced it as 'infant reality'.

there were many jokes made about such. 

[borjam]

I remember playing some sort of tank sim :-) on these at Lilly Research labs in Sunninghill in the UK during my work experience.

Bzflag? Still alive

https://www.bzflag.org

[stj]

yes, i play that almost every day on "planet MOFO" server.

[janoc]

Ah yeah, Onyx But this box is only the "baby" version. I used to moonlight as a sysadmin in a lab that was running quite a few O2s, Indy2 (the purple ones), Octanes and we had a single rack Onyx 2 with two Infinity Reality 2 graphic pipes driving  two consoles/workstations. That were basically two of those boxes stacked vertically, with an enormous horizontal fan between them. It needed three phase power and made a racket like a jet engine. But it was the duck's guts if you wanted to do computer graphics at the time - nobody was coming even close to the rendering power these machines had.

There were even larger versions, up to two racks and 6 graphic pipes (one rack was the main "CPU" unit + 2 pipes, the other rack 4 pipes) - those were used to drive virtual reality CAVEs and such.

SGI made gorgeous hardware which was joy to work on - built like a tank but very easy to service. Something like a CPU upgrade was a 10 minute job tops, including rolling up and putting away the antistatic mat - everything, including the CPUs, was a module and on connectors, there were almost no cables at all inside the cabinets.

[linux-works]

I guess its ok to say, since it was so long ago and sgi is not even a company anymore (not the same, for sure).

I worked in IT and was connected to the 'move team' (who handled network addr provisioning and lots of other stuff).  office moves, even whole groups, were common.  you'd get boxes on a thursday, box things up on a friday and the move team would move you and you'd be connected and ready on monday am.

thing is, taking down workstations that are always-up and leaving them down for 2 days gives a hell of a thermal shock.  a large number of the pwr supplies went kaboom when they powered on, again.  it happened more than it should have and in more than a few lines.

at the time, there were marketing posters around the buildings with the slogan 'ignite your mind' and some flames in the background.  I knew the real secret, it was the PSUs that were igniting.  better not stand near one when it turns on!