SGI: Discussion

Arti77 writes:
> Hey Ian, that was a great reel you put together, pretty much sums it up. ...

Thanks!

How did the file play btw? What system did you use? I've not setup the codecs on my updated PC setup yet (new mbd
and gfx ), so I haven't done any further DivX work for ages.


> ... I can't wait to see the full one

Hehe, that might take a while. My O2 video setup is kinda disassembled atm, pending the construction of a custom O2 unit
with various upgrades (eg. Gbit NIC) and lots of 300GB drives. I just received a 48-port Gbit switch today, so getting
there slowly.


>... Do you have any more interesting video clips?

Loads. Hours and hours. I intend to capture & digitise all of them eventually. Quick check... must have about 35 vids
overall, from SGI & AliasWavefront demos through to system installation & training videos for Challenge/Onyx/Origin/etc.

Ian.

mapesdhs wrote: Loads. Hours and hours. I intend to capture & digitise all of them eventually. Quick check... must have about 35 vids
overall, from SGI & AliasWavefront demos through to system installation & training videos for Challenge/Onyx/Origin/etc.

Ian.

! Say, you wouldn't happen to have an Alias|Wavefront promotional video for A|W's product line (includes PowerAnimator--7? 8? Can't remember) which includes interviews with Richard Edlund (Boss Film Studios), folk from DreamQuest and VIFX, would you? My copy is long gone, and I mourn that loss quite a bit.

It was a pretty distinctive tape. Had some mariachi music set to some wind-up Godzilla toys near the end, as well as the obligatory clips from vfx films scattered throughout (Casper, Species, and pretty much everything made up to that point).

scottE writes:
> Say, you wouldn't happen to have an Alias|Wavefront promotional video for A|W's product line (includes PowerAnimator--7? 8? Can't remember)
> which includes interviews with Richard Edlund (Boss Film Studios), folk from DreamQuest and VIFX, would you? My copy is long gone, and I mourn
> that loss quite a bit.

Yup, got that, one of my favourites.


> It was a pretty distinctive tape. Had some mariachi music set to some wind-up Godzilla toys near the end, as well as the obligatory clips from vfx
> films scattered throughout (Casper, Species, and pretty much everything made up to that point).

I have their later demo videos aswell.

Ian.

Hey Ian, well played well on my core 2 duo work laptop, I'll have to try it on my o2 R10 195 and let you know. Can't wait until you digitise them all. These videos are rare and are the only way we can travel back in time to relive the 'glory' days

Please let us know when you finish digitising some of them.

Regards

Arti77 writes:
> Hey Ian, well played well on my core 2 duo work laptop, ...

Excellent!!


> ... I'll have to try it on my o2 R10 195 and let you know. ...

I suspect it will suck... (better on any VPro system, processed in hardware).


> ... Can't wait until you digitise them all. These videos are rare and are the only way we can travel back in time to relive the 'glory' days

Alas it has to wait until my time doesn't have to be taken up so much with earning a living. *sigh*


> Please let us know when you finish digitising some of them.

Wilco!

Ian.

mapesdhs wrote:

Indyboy wrote: ... but unfortunately the diamond of my collection is still missing

If it wasn't for the lack of working PSUs, I'd put a number of Indigos on eBid, low start, no reserve. I must have
nearly 30 Indigos, but nowhere near enough working PSUs, R3K or otherwise, so in my garage they must stay for
the moment. :\ ( pic 1 , pic 2 ; taken after new shelves purchased back in January. More Indigos are stored elsewhere)

I do have a number of CPU/gfx boards which I'll list soonish, but no systems to list until I can find some more PSUs.
That's a real problem with Indigo now: the TOD battery can be replaced, but finding more PSUs is a pain. However,
I heard from someone who's rigged up a normal ATX PSU inside the original PSU case, but it's a lot of work.

Ian.

No, lack of money It looks like I can get an R4k config in good shape but unfortunately w/o sled(s) and with LG1 gfx. It's hard to get an SGI here in Hungary so I'm more than happy that this beauty showed up.

mapesdhs wrote: I have their later demo videos aswell.

Ian.

Thank god for archivists.

scottE wrote: Thank god for archivists.

Agreed, but here is a danger though. For example, there was a well known archivist of ancient CP/M boot media for just about any CP/M machine you could imagine. People would go to him whenever they came across a rare machine and he'd set them up with appropriate boot media.

Then one day he died, and his entire collection went with him. None of it was stored on the Internet, so there were no mirrors. Lots of one of kind software sets are now apparently lost, perhaps forever.

Not to be a downer (mortality is a touchy subject), I just hope that one day you do take the time to get these videos out there so they won't suffer a similar fate

nekonoko writes:
> Then one day he died, and his entire collection went with him. None of it was stored on the Internet, so there were no
> mirrors. Lots of one of kind software sets are now apparently lost, perhaps forever.

I've heard of that happening before with print media; someone dies and their vast collection of whatever ends up being pulped.


> Not to be a downer (mortality is a touchy subject), I just hope that one day you do take the time to get these videos out there
> so they won't suffer a similar fate

Easy solution: I do one of those "Send 1 pound a month" adverts, for the Ian/SGI charity (sic), then I could work on all this stuff
and the site full-time instead of having to spend all my time covering the rent, etc. If everyone sent me 50c/week...

I've been planning on constructing a mega-O2 for a while, to do all this video archiving, but it's slow going. Most weeks I don't
have any spare time to work on it. The end setup will include an Octane2 with VPro + Octane Compression to deal with VHS
tapes of poorer quality (Cosmo2 handles bad signals better than O2 ICE). Last stage is my PC for final format video conversion,
which was the most recent thing I was able to work on (new mbd / gfx paid for by gf/family as it was my bday in May).

This planet spins too damn fast, at least for me anyway. Can hardly believe I obtained a quad-600 O300 in February but wasn't
able to finally cable it up & try it out until June...

Ian.

nekonoko wrote:

scottE wrote: Thank god for archivists.

Agreed, but here is a danger though. For example, there was a well known archivist of ancient CP/M boot media for just about any CP/M machine you could imagine. People would go to him whenever they came across a rare machine and he'd set them up with appropriate boot media.

Then one day he died, and his entire collection went with him. None of it was stored on the Internet, so there were no mirrors. Lots of one of kind software sets are now apparently lost, perhaps forever.

If you've got a nice collection of something, it's a good idea to have a preplanned agreement between you and someone else (or a couple of someone-elses) stuck somewhere near the will. Make it known that when you're dead, so-and-so will take care of everything related to [fill in blank here]. Most of the time the loss of rare material is because the survivors don't know what to do with it and aren't in an emotional state where they want to deal with the "junk" so to speak.

I became interested in SGI when i first saw toy story. this prompted me to seek out sites like "Buying an SGI System" http://cgi.amazing.com/internet/old-sgi-faq.html which prompted my first thirst for the 4D/20 or 4D/25; i subsequently obtained 3. after that things really got out of hand. the most i've had was around 30 including 4 predators, 3 crimsons, a single and a twin tower as the largest of my family. since then, i've cut down on most of the big beasts, only a couple of origins, and an onyx2 in addition to the SkyWriter, plus a bunch of desktops of various flavors.

Saw this older thread and thought to add to the list...

Became interested in SGI's when a company went broke in the mid to late 90's sold all the Internet servers. Grabbed two SGI Indy's at the time. They came with two SGI monitors, full Irix CD sets, keyboards, and external SGI CD ROM. From memory paid only a few hundred for them at the time, which was pretty good when they were only a few years old.


Could not get over how well integrated the graphical interface was with the Unix command line way of doing things. Once you get hooked by an SGI, they are hard to get away from...

cris_adder wrote: Could not get over how well integrated the graphical interface was with the Unix command line way of doing things.

Which pretty much tainted my appreciation of Solaris/Linux/etcetera.

Jurassic Park lead me down the IRIX path. I also was really wanting to learn a UNIX system and a bit of graphic editing. I also longed for the command driven days, like back in the 90s. The fact they developed the graphics for the N64 and make such cool machines has kept me hooked. I think that is why I have 6 more machines in the mail...

hey now this thread has been bumped again and again and I've posted thrice but is it just me or is the modern wintel stuff getting worse and worse? I have a bit of a saga here and need to rant...

I spent... a long time... trying to figure out how to get windows 7 just to display filename extensions yesterday (why they would hide them in the first place is beyond me). Gave up, couldn't figure it out. used CMD to copy files the old fashioned way. Maybe this proves how computer illiterate I am.

I had recorded some .aiff files with the octane and copied them over to my PC to burn a CD. You see, the PC has a burner and the octane does not. Well, windows 7 (the media player) refused to burn because there was no 'file usage rights' or something like that (what's that? it's my recording, it's my hardware, and it's my blank CD... why can't I put it all together??! maybe the microsoft company trying to fool the silly viruses again!)

Actually the first time I tried to burn on windows 7 I selected the .aiff files, hit 'burn' in explorer and it opened the tray and told me to put in a blank disc. I did so, and a little dialog box popped up that said how much time was left... easy! too easy... there was one big track on the CD and no sound came out when I tried to play it!

Compare this to the octane... soon after this ordeal (which happened quite recently mind you) I picked up a scuzzy cdburner for the octane... "cdrecord -audio -pad track1 track2 track3 etc..." and out popped a nice shiny disc with beautiful sound that plays in all sorts of machines.

^^ "DRM" -- which is one big reason any windows crap in here is never going past win2k.

I just thought it was funny how I hit the burn button and had selected a bunch of audio files (uncompressed .aiffs that I had created exactly to CD audio specifications) and windows explorer proceeded to make a data-formatted CD.

First time I've ever been slapped in the face by DRM as well, even though I have all sorts of pirated stuffz around and also DRM 'technology' all around as well. I was assuming it was a file permission problem or something like that.

point being, irix makes things easy , windows makes things hard .

No hardware I own has a trace of Microsoft code since 1999, I figure if I can't do with Linux it can't have been that worth doing in the first place...

sybrfreq wrote: point being, irix makes things easy , windows makes things hard .

IRIX (and Solaris, and OpenVMS, and ...) expect that you know a little about your machine or know how to find it out. They work great if you can be bothered to learn about your machine.

Windows works OK if you aren't interested in learning anything about your machine. Once you start to learn how things work Windows becomes extremely irritating.

My guess is that 80% of the PC hardware/software is made for people who allow themselves to believe that "it's supposed to work (or not work) that way" when faced with something that doesn't work properly.

Hey, now this thread has been bumped and given that I never "properly" introduced myself I might as well add something here...

So, what got me into SGIs... Long story. My computing experience started off with VIC-20/C64 in the eighties and I loved those machines - you could take them apart, they (especially the C64) could already be useful, yet they were so simple to tinker with. I finally got my first PC in 1992, as the C64 just didn't cut it anymore. I'd have loved to have gotten a Mac, but they were just unaffordable, so I settled for a 486. Coming from he C64 experience, the whole DOS/Win3.x experience never was quite satisfying - far too many "Why the heck is this thing doing this?" moments. Then I had my first contact with Suns at university (Linux shortly afterwards). Wow, what a difference - fascinating machines - finally machines again where I at least had the feeling that I control the computer, not the other way round[0]... That affection grew stronger during my first jobs, where - luckily - I always had a Sun on my desk and not a PC. While I went from Win3.x straight to Linux at home (since 1997), it took a few more years before I finally could afford my first Sun. And the second. And the third... ...you get the picture. That collection basically grew until the time I became a father and a home owner - both well known time and money drains... (...though I wouldn't have it any other way...)

All this time I was vaguely aware of other Unices and the corresponding hardware. I got some very limited experience with HP-UX at two workplaces - and of course I knew of SGI. I remember seeing an Indigo2 Impact and an Octane at some place once and I found them aweinspiring and I had heard many stories about their graphical capabilities and they looked nice to boot... I also almost bought an Indy at some point, but was put off by the vague legality with regard to the OS - and I decided to leave it at Suns.

That all lay pretty much dormant over the past years - until that fatal day last November, when a house nearby was sold and the previous owner apparently cleaned out everything. The resulting dumpster was just too tempting, so I went for some scavenging. I had already bagged an old P1 laptop and a DEC VX40 when I discovered the two largish purple computer cases at the bottom. From all I knew that could only be SGIs... I left them at first, in doubt whether I should dare to start yet another project I don't really have time for - but did start some reading (thanks Ian - already told you that your site was crucial... ). That really got me interested - so I went back the next day (thank God the night was dry) and fetched both of them... They turned out to be the two Indigo 2 Impacts I have in my signature - scratched, of course, but fully functional. I managed to get Irix 6.5 onto the R10k and got it running - and was hooked. Just the functionality of the set-up was amazing. I wish Sun's CDE had looked and worked like 4DWM back then - I might have skipped all my experiments with alternative window managers at the time... Anyway, this got me interested enough so I spared a little Christmas cash for a present to myself: The Octane. And to round it off, I got the Indy for free with the Octane which I was very happy with. Funny enough, so far I've spent more time at the Indy than at the Octane - the Indy is such a cute little thing, IMO...

So, these days I'm trying to sell off some old Sun and PC stuff and save a little money so I can upgrade the SGIs a bit more (maybe a V6 for the Octane at some point in the next 2-3 months). In any case, they've successfully conquered a place in my network/collection...

Cheerio,

Thomas

[0] That's a gripe I still have with Windows and - to some extent - with Apples (and even some newer Linux distros)