SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period. They were the desire of nearly every UNIX nerd back then.
I think the irony of this is the MIPS processors weren't that good for very long at all. (Famously Toy Story was rendered on SparcStations, even if the animation was prepared on SGIs). The PA-RISC ones seemed to have the most staying power, but many people don't view HP 9000 as sexy in the way SGI was.
In grad school, I ended up borrowing an old teal Indigo2, with graphics upgrade, that my research group had sitting around, to use from my dorm room, mainly as a terminal.
(I owned almost nothing in the world at the time, not even a computer, having shed my possessions in a "Gattaca" kind of way, of not saving anything for the swim back from grad school. But an SGI Indigo2 is more than powerful enough to be an SSH terminal, and my electricity use wasn't metered. And, unlike the laptops I'd borrowed, no one would want the Indigo2 back.)
Getting IRIX installed involved multiple installation tapes (or was it CD-ROMs?) that some kind person in the lab happened to still have.
An admin later offered to give me this Indigo2 that I was borrowing, but they first needed me to bring it back in for inventory. Around then, I'd finally built (or was about to build) a Linux box, and hauling the Indigo2 and its huge CRT anywhere was a chore without a car, and I'd soon be graduating, and moving away lightly. So I carted the Indigo2 back across campus, and left it for good. Hopefully it ended up with someone who preserved it, as the author here does.
I used an Indy with X11 forwarding for a while, I could run a modern Firefox from my Linux machine, which worked nicely. As much as it looked like it was running natively, it really wasn't, so downloads would end up on the other computer, and sound would also play remotely.
Because I never throw anything away I still have a small bunch of these machines in the attic (apart from the Indigo they are all teal though) waiting for this kind of treatment, which have been super high on my to-do list.
Same for me circa 1993 in my uni a friend got a dumped vaxstation running Ultrix from the IT department, this was my first PC as I had no money at the time.
It had two stacked large PCB, the upper one was full of RAM chips totalling a whoping 8 MByte of RAM ;)
Really liked your post, the way you brought that old Indigo back to life was super fun to read. I totally agree that the magic is in seeing the machine actually run again, not just sitting on a shelf.
For me, I’ve messed with a couple of old PCs before, but nothing as cool as an SGI box. Reading this makes me think I should try grabbing one if I ever spot it cheap.
Thanks for sharing the journey—would love to see more pics of the messy steps too, not just the polished result. Feels like hanging out with a fellow retro nerd.
In the article you mentioned the Indy having a T1 interface. I only remembered having ISDN as an option on them, with the use case being that ISDN was pretty easily orderable for people working from home or branch offices and needing to get online with it. T1s were still exotic, expensive and not available in a lot of places. Do you have a T1 card for an Indy? I'd love to see that! Do you know what the intention of that was?
I worked vfx on teal Indigo2 at the time and then max impact purple one.. later on Octane, Octane2, etc.
BUT, this second generation of SGIs felt special. Ok a third gen, but the first one in beige boxes does not count. Crimson in gen before was also special.
Years later I was given a machine I worked on, since I'm in retro machines and game and all and to my disappointment it was the purple one, not teal (teal got lost somewhere). Now, imagine that since purple one is vastly superior to teal one, hah. Got indy along with it, webcam and all to be web ready!
I only skimmed through article for now, but is there a specific reason you haven't went with period-correct IRIX 5.x and went with 6? On a side note, SD2SCSI or similar to get rid of the spinning rust? And ultimate question, what do we all do with power supplies? They will die.
Quite interesting read, like many on those days, I really looked up for SGI, and visited regularly their site due to them being the host for original C++ STL documentation.
Dunno. I worked (fortunately only) very briefly on one (Octane I _think_). Still remember the trashcan were flames shot out, when one was dragging a file on it. Cute the first three times. Other than that, I remember the bad flicker (in Europe 50Hz only!) of the (large, then) colour monitor and the noise. Oh, the noise. Fellow users tried to mitigate it by hiding it behind the door to the server room to little effect. I'm sure it's performance as graphics workstation were outstanding (which I had no use for then), but the ergonomics were just awful.
Most beat it, e. g. the aesthetically much superior UI of the Canon Cat, which one can admire on the same website. Aside from that, many SGI computer cases look tacky, sort of like the N64 of the computer world; they also remind me a bit of Colani's case designs. Well, at least the guts were/are impressive.
Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine. Among workstations SGI was light years ahead - the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
> Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine.
Equation (as opposed to comparison) and preference are two very different things, friend. And yes, I'm one of those weirdos who prefers minimal, low-color, high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs and TUIs to, say, SGIs offerings. Like the Canon Cat's and many others. We'll both live.
> [...] the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
The GUI is not as grotten ugly to me as those from most modern offerings, or certain vintage offenders, e. g. early-to-mid Workbench, Windows XP (excluding the Classic Theme), I'll give you that. But it certainly doesn't knock me out of my socks.
> The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.
The criticism, "implications" (i. e. your speculations) aside, is that based on the screenshots of the desktop I've seen it's just not enough for me. Not even close.
But since I've never used an SGI workstation, I am indeed largely ignorant of its "hidden" UI/UX qualities. And who knows? Maybe you can pimp the desktop's visual design enough that even I fall in love with it.
> Your claims are IRIX is not "high res" and not "angular/facetted", both of which are objectively ludicrous, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
The only thing that is objectively ludicrous here is your substandard reading comprehension. I claimed that I have a (strong) preference for the all the UI attributes I mentioned in my post (and not just the ones you cherry-picked), which therefore, based on the various screenshots of SGI desktops I've seen, translates to me not being so hot and bothered about these very desktops as you are. I suggest you get over it and invest in some evidently much needed English-language remedial classes.
I fucking love beige! Besides, there were many non-beige PCs on the market, especially outside of the US. And no SGI workstation ever had the coolness factor of something like the all-black, pyramid-styled Meadata Systems/Technologies "Snofru" 386 workstation from 1989 (which might've been just a Tradeshow Special).
Remember "Erwin", the SGI O2 in the userfriendly.org comic? https://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1065/737/1600/user%20fri...
The comic is now dead, but it had a long and amazing run.
I still keep an SGI O2, Octane, and Fuel around for nostalgia hits nowadays, and they never disappoint:
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel_Blen...
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg
In grad school, I ended up borrowing an old teal Indigo2, with graphics upgrade, that my research group had sitting around, to use from my dorm room, mainly as a terminal.
(I owned almost nothing in the world at the time, not even a computer, having shed my possessions in a "Gattaca" kind of way, of not saving anything for the swim back from grad school. But an SGI Indigo2 is more than powerful enough to be an SSH terminal, and my electricity use wasn't metered. And, unlike the laptops I'd borrowed, no one would want the Indigo2 back.)
Getting IRIX installed involved multiple installation tapes (or was it CD-ROMs?) that some kind person in the lab happened to still have.
An admin later offered to give me this Indigo2 that I was borrowing, but they first needed me to bring it back in for inventory. Around then, I'd finally built (or was about to build) a Linux box, and hauling the Indigo2 and its huge CRT anywhere was a chore without a car, and I'd soon be graduating, and moving away lightly. So I carted the Indigo2 back across campus, and left it for good. Hopefully it ended up with someone who preserved it, as the author here does.
It had two stacked large PCB, the upper one was full of RAM chips totalling a whoping 8 MByte of RAM ;)
BUT, this second generation of SGIs felt special. Ok a third gen, but the first one in beige boxes does not count. Crimson in gen before was also special.
Years later I was given a machine I worked on, since I'm in retro machines and game and all and to my disappointment it was the purple one, not teal (teal got lost somewhere). Now, imagine that since purple one is vastly superior to teal one, hah. Got indy along with it, webcam and all to be web ready!
I only skimmed through article for now, but is there a specific reason you haven't went with period-correct IRIX 5.x and went with 6? On a side note, SD2SCSI or similar to get rid of the spinning rust? And ultimate question, what do we all do with power supplies? They will die.
Heck, even now most business equipment (even the art calibrated ones) are 60Hz…
Equation (as opposed to comparison) and preference are two very different things, friend. And yes, I'm one of those weirdos who prefers minimal, low-color, high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs and TUIs to, say, SGIs offerings. Like the Canon Cat's and many others. We'll both live.
> [...] the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
The GUI is not as grotten ugly to me as those from most modern offerings, or certain vintage offenders, e. g. early-to-mid Workbench, Windows XP (excluding the Classic Theme), I'll give you that. But it certainly doesn't knock me out of my socks.
The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.
The criticism, "implications" (i. e. your speculations) aside, is that based on the screenshots of the desktop I've seen it's just not enough for me. Not even close.
But since I've never used an SGI workstation, I am indeed largely ignorant of its "hidden" UI/UX qualities. And who knows? Maybe you can pimp the desktop's visual design enough that even I fall in love with it.
> But since I've never used an SGI workstation
Evidently.
The only thing that is objectively ludicrous here is your substandard reading comprehension. I claimed that I have a (strong) preference for the all the UI attributes I mentioned in my post (and not just the ones you cherry-picked), which therefore, based on the various screenshots of SGI desktops I've seen, translates to me not being so hot and bothered about these very desktops as you are. I suggest you get over it and invest in some evidently much needed English-language remedial classes.