SGI: Discussion

Hello all,

Perhaps the Indigo fans will like this; I came across a two-page advertisement for Silicon Graphics' Indigo a while ago. I hadn't seen it anywhere else, so I thought I should scan it and post it here.

The image above is intentionally scaled down (don't want to put strain on nekochan site traffic). A bigger version (4888x3166, 5.6 MB) can be downloaded here .

I suspect the result is not fantastic (the break between the two pages is quite discernible, for example), but it was all I could do with an all-in-one printer/scanner and my own limited photo retouching skills.

Freaking awesome, that's about as close as SGI ever came to marketing its products to the general public, thanks a bunch for posting it...

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Btw, does anyone have Octane ads and posters?

nongrato wrote: Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Btw, does anyone have Octane ads and posters?

No ads, but I have an Octane refrigerator magnet on my fridge, and a mini-Octane keychain in storage some place. Also an inflatable O2.

I know an ex-SGI employee with an "IRIX is forever!" button. Also he has some business cards from his days in the company and, up until a year or two ago, he had an Octane2 maxed out. I shudder to think what he did with it.

TeamBlackFox wrote: I shudder to think what he did with it.

Hopefully he passed it on, whole, to someone else in some form. I saw an eBay auction years ago of a nicely-decked out Octane. Someone won it for about $500 or so. About eight hours later, the *same* Octane was parted out on eBay by that buyer, each part priced astronomically above what he paid for the machine as a whole. I was able to compare the pictures of one of the parts to the original listing, and the S/N's matched up. Twas quite sad :/

It is for those people, I am certain, that Dante created a tenth circle.

I found this one in BYTE, March, 1992. Will see if I can do a highres scan.

I remember an Indy ad in Wired. Wish I could find it now, because I drooled over it at the time (as a starving university undergrad).

About all the SGI swag I have now, other than the Indy bag, is an SGI mousepad.

sgifanatic wrote: I found this one in BYTE.

"Cheaper"? Really?

nongrato wrote:

sgifanatic wrote: I found this one in BYTE.

"Cheaper"? Really?

Not really "cheaper" in general, but perhaps relatively cheap for the specific set of tasks it excelled at. A DX2-66 from Dell w 8MB RAM was ~ $4,500 in '92. The base model Indigo server ran $6,400 w 8MB RAM. Not sure how the disk compared, but the MIPS ratings were 25 and 30 respectively. The Indigo was certainly priced a thousand or so dollars higher, on a per MIPS basis, but then it also offered quite a bit more expansion capability and sophistication.

Unix workstations survived the 486, but the advent of NT on the Pentium truly thrashed them. There was a temporary illusion of well being created by the .com spending spree, where Sun, in particular, could do no wrong, but looking at it from a true feature/value perspective, the Pentium had already delivered a mortal wound.

Here's a higher res version. I am no graphics artist, but here is my best effort with GIMP.

nongrato wrote: "Cheaper"? Really?

Yes, cheaper. The Indigo was supposed to be the vanguard of the graphics/RISC/Unix move into what is now Apple territory. The graphics were far superior to anything available in the DOS world, while being much cheaper than the Evans & Sutherland stuff. IBM, Sun, HP and SGI were supposed to get together to rationalize the Unixes and take over the desktop. Clark wanted to bring graphics to the masses. He even developed set-top teevee boxes.

Greed and self-interest ruined that. "Inventor's Dilemna" my ass, think 'Midas'. One thing you have to give Billy Gates : he understood that ten cents out of every sale in a bazillion sale world is better than ten thousand dollars per transaction in a world that sells three machines a year.

SGI started out as cheap.

hamei wrote: The graphics were far superior to anything available in the DOS world, while being much cheaper than the Evans & Sutherland stuff.

People in the PC demo/mod scene in the early 90's were doing some *insane* things with low-grade 386/486 hardware. If you haven't heard of nor seen Unreal ][ - The 2nd Reality, take ~15mins out of your day and watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA

Wikipedia entry (has links to a download location and source code):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reality

Wasn't the majority of the x86 demoscene heavily reliant on a assembly and hardware constraint? It was the era when clones were still everywhere.

pentium wrote: Wasn't the majority of the x86 demoscene heavily reliant on a assembly and hardware constraint? It was the era when clones were still everywhere.

I believe C and ASM were the preferred choices of programming languages. Looks like Unreal ][ also used TurboPascal as well. They used DOS' memory manager, but basically wrote their own video and sound drivers to directly interact w/ the hardware. Still very impressive to pull off some of the effects that they did on low-end hardware. 3D Mark (FutureMark) and other companies were founded by former members of Future Crew, and you can still find Purple Motion (Jonne Valtonen) composing music in the form of symphonic recreations of classic video game music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV0ycCKRT1E

those old demos were very low resolution, and never show more than a dozen polygons. they make it seem like more than it is using tricks that manipulate the display format (like "smooth scrolling" and colormap animation). I remember being really impressed by some of those effects back in the early '90s, like "plasma". the first time you see it, it looks amazing. but in actual fact, it's a static image, only the colormap is changing.
But, hey, whatever floats your boat. That "Type R" sticker really does make it go faster, right?