SGI: Discussion

Dag yo!

By all accounts Dean never recovered from the untimely death of his son, suffered in an aircraft accident he was the pilot of...

For me, it's some nostalgia and wanting to own once expensive machines that were involved in the creative CGI process of some fantastic Hollywood movies. I've had an Octane for about 6 years, but just acquired a (new to me) O2 as well. The Octane is also getting some upgrades.

I intend on putting more time into learning the ins and outs of these fantastic machines.

I also have a few 68K Macs that I've collected (Quadra 700 and Quadra 840AV) and I'll never get rid of, they were the first machines I used for CAD and graphics after college at some of my first jobs.

A wise colleague of mine once told me, "A piece of technology will never do anything less that it did the day it was new." Since then I've always remembered that it's society (and the expectations) that changes, but not the tech.

It's a difficult one for me. I wouldn't say I "collect" them per-se, it's just me trying to get hold of a piece of computing history and owning a piece of kit that (when I was about 13 years old) first made me properly say "wow!" when I saw what it looked like and what it was capable of at the time.

Now, I've moved on from my earlier post in this thread and I am indeed the proud owner of my most favourite SGI machine - an Indigo2 IMPACT. Even now, I still play around on it once or twice a week, and it still gives me a buzz to see it sitting there all purple and gorgeous in the corner of my room.

Over the last couple of days I've been "decommissioning" my O2 and preparing it for storage (copying all my useful data off, pulling the 300GB hard drives out, cloning the OS onto two smaller HDDs for storage and possible future use). The reason? It's being replaced with the one other SGI machine I've always wanted to own - a Fuel. Reason being that when I acquired my Indys, it was SGI's current IRIX machine (along with the Tezro) that they were selling (I always remember seeing it proudly displayed on SGI's site), and it also ended up being part of the final generation of MIPS/IRIX machines.

Oh, and the missus says I'm only allowed 2 SGIs in my office room - hence why the O2 has to make way. Still, it hardly gets used anyway now I have the Indigo2. To me historically, the I2 is just a more special machine. The O2 (to me) was always designed as a budget machine (well, as budget as SGI get) and was used for teaching the students. The Indigo2 though was the high-end machine of its time and was used by the professional 3D developers.

For me, I was somewhere between 8 and 11 years old, and was leaving a military hospital after a basic check up (I'm a military brat). Twas a quiet day on the air base, and as me and my dad were walking back to the car, we saw over in an adjacent parking lot, this large, all-black semi-truck with the big SGI cube logo on the side of the trailer, in silver. I had to go have a look, so, begrudgingly, my dad walked me over there to see if they'ed let us look inside. Sure enough, they had no problem, so we walked up the stairs into one side of the trailer into a fully carpeted room with a whole slew of SGI systems on a table, all running demos and the like. Couldn't touch anything, but I remember they at least had Indy and Indigo2 systems up and running. Spent about 5-10mins just staring at systems I thought were totally out of this world (all I had at home was an IBM PC/XT that booted MS-DOS 3.0 and a Commodore 64), then left and headed home.

That's all it took, and I've made it my life goal not only to acquire as many SGI systems as I have room for, but to try and get a few of them to run and do things. Throw in getting to use an Indy at Epcot Innoventions in the mid-90's, the Nintendo 64 being a joint Nintendo/SGI thing, and my childhood can be partially defined as having an SGI obsession.

Running IRIX on them is easy, but that's a dead OS now (I know a lot of people here don't like hearing that). Unless SGI/Rackable dumps the source code at some point (support ended Dec 2013, so...), it's going to get progressively harder to try new things on these systems. So...Linux! Which is not easy, because I am not a kernel hacker and it can take me days of puzzling over hardware documentation to get something to work that more seasoned programmers could do blind and with one hand.

I only recently started to resurrect Linux on the Octane, and that was tough to try and decipher how the HEART ASIC works, how to update Stan's old code, and how to wire in new Linux subsystem changes to make it all tick. Still stuck on getting SMP to boot, but all in time. Linux/MIPS has been somewhat taken over by commercial interests lately, and there just doesn't seem to be a lot of the old hobbyist crowd around anymore. So maybe I can put some spark back into that side of things soon. I still have to unify portions of the IOC3 driver with the IP27 side, and try to send in patches and not get shredded on the LKML over it. Then, big maaaaaaaaaybe, try to tackle IP35 support.

When people puzzle over why this interests me, I ask them if they've ever met someone that collects old cars. That's when the light bulb comes on and they understand my love for these old machines.

PS, in terms of going for SGI rarities, I acquired this off of eBay recently and hung it on the wall above the Tezro:

I am obsessed with retrocomputing, I don't really know why but I like the fact that I'm saving systems from landfills and keeping them in use.

I like high-end 90s RISC servers. I mostly collect Sun, but also a little SGI. I don't like workstations, realtime graphics, or funny cases. But an Origin-2000 is an amazing piece of hardware. I have a few smaller SGIs (O2 & O200), only because it makes dealing with the big machine easier. (O2 is a nice install server, etc.)

I was exposed to a 4D 310 VGX in a design firm many many years ago. First SGI was able to get my hands on was a Indigo 2 R4k with solid impact graphics... These days I still use my Onyx Desksides for modeling elements and or portions of scenes

back then in 2008, it has been always my dream to acquire a Octane2. I saved up enough money from part time work, instead of blowing cash for thrill ride on fast car like all my friends did, I've bought a retired Tezro system that comes with all the extra boxes (VBOB, Stone Storage, etc...) for Discreet SMOKE.

I've thought I could used it for any serious works but at that time any x86 would have smoked MIPs and most pro softwares were no longer developed ( started with Maya jumped to x86 and Discreet stop developing IFFFs for IRIX). The machine becomes my trophy, I don't use it as much aside from turning it on now and then, just to muck around and being mesmerized by the incredible CPU case design ( by Frog Design Inc. btw ). Due to have no fixed place ( i was living in the apartment unit and shared with 4 other students ), I've decided to sell it fellow nekochan member in sydney, knowing it that he will take good care of it.