For me, I'm practically raised between computers. My dad got them from where he works. I remember playing games on a archimedes, we had a big box full with floppy wich all contained one or more games.
Later, we played games on an a5000, the only name I can remember, but we had an HUGE load of games!!! It were 5 maps, each containing I guess about 40 games.
Later, my father bought an 368, and we weren't allowed to play games on it (remember, I was about 8 years old then). Later, we played a game stunts on it, and it was great. After that one, a 486 came and a 166 mhz pentium. That was ofcourse a fast one, but being raised on a archimedes with gui and then discovering the commandline family, you aren't that exited. After that, It was an AMD K6-3 of 400 mhz, and after that an intel 1000mhz.
I bought the 166 mhz of my dad, and my bigger brother the 400mhz. And so we played duke nukem on network. After that, I bought the 400 mhz system of my brother, and that's when I really got interested, as the amd was a really good processor of it's time, and the asus motherboard was a good one. And it had 320 mb of memmory, it had an upgrade.
After that, I bought my first new pc (moreless new, not all the components), an AMD 2500+.
Im still using that one, but my first contact and the start of my sgi history was when I was around 11-12 years old, I was going with my dad to his work. And there, he showed some nice stuff of satellite images (he works at the ITC in Enschede) on an intelbox. There were 3 intelboxed crammed on one desk and one in the other corner.
But what the most interesting thing was, were the 3 octanes with the huge 20" 4011P screens. Each one had an external scsi cdrom and floppy drive and had a speakerset. They were set up on a big desk, and the octanes were on top of them, unlike the intelboxen crammed below one desk.
That what kind of love at first sight, the trio of octanes, the big green boxes that just look awesome and really look powerfull.
I just loved the way they looked, with the mean-looking vents in the top and the beatyful design. I never saw them working, they were just on the screensaver with a black screen, but I knew they were special, and they looked special, but above all impressive.
Those 3 octanes were my first meeting with an silicon graphics machine, and I still like them, they still look awesome powerfull and kick-ass. They also had an O2, with was ofcourse also really nice, I never saw a computer that small and still look like a really good one.
But the sgi stuff got replaced, furtunately, because they were sold to the personel. My father buyed one o2 and one compelete octane with everything that belongs to it, for only 90 euros! Including the big 20" screen!
I got to play with it, and I thought the software would be handy. So he got the full cd-set of irix 6.5.2. It is old, but it was free.
Playing around with the octane was fun, It had an really thick owners manual, and everything of the system showed it was an really high-end machine, nowadays, a normal computer comes without any usefull insturction, but an manual really thick and a system that feels it has real power inside is just so much nicer than a normal tower model with feels just plain simple. We also had an o2 with an 17 inch monitor and camera, on wich my little brother used to work. And later I got another one of the 20" screens (now on my pc). So a third of the sgi machines of my dad's job is now at home with us.
When I was going trought tweakers.net, I saw a guy offering an sgi origin 200 for only 175, so I asked him is he still got it. He said: "Yes, you can have it for 50 euros, it's only gathering dust around here." Me happy, and I bought it. After a LOT of problems, I got it working. My first own sgi, as the rest is my dad's but praktically mine as he doesn't use them.
And now I'm still looking for more used machines, even tought I probably won't have any use for them (or I'll find some
), but I just like them.
Unfortunately, the things I liked the most of sgi are disapearing, mips is going away, as is irix. Now, they just use linux, like everybody. It loses the special touch it has. And the (sh)itanium isn't making it better. And they lost the cube logo! Compare an octane to an standard office computer. I think you'll get it. I hope what made sgi unique isn't disapearing.
So, i'm early in contact with sgi (I'm now 17) and I'm already loving the systems
My origin 200 brought me to the forum, all the problems I had needed a solution. And I found one here, so I'm not leaving
Really!
/256MB/XS-24, R5K 150MHz
/160MB/XL-24, R10K 175MHz
/640MB, R12K 400MHz
/Vpro6/1GB & R4K 250 MHz
/128 MB/XZ Extreme/GIO64 FDDI