I just saw the notification in my e-mail and thought, "Oh nice, the SGI dude is back!" By the way, 20 minutes is relatively short. I've watched your SGI videos over and over, countless times, and in fact, after this, I'll probably head back and watch it again! Keep it up dude! You were missed.
Hi there! Yep, there's a reason it cost that much. It's a beast of a machine. I love your channel, by the way. Let me know if you ever want to do anything SGI-related in one of your videos. I'd be glad to help.
Mathcubes, that is actually not the easiest question to answer. The system is not just a graphics card equivalent. It would be a lot more comparable to a pc as a whole. The difficulty of comparing it to modern systems is that the chip architecture itself, and the way the parts and silicon are layed out on those pcb's, along with the os and software, are so much different than a pc. There are many chips on those boards that have been absorbed into other chips, or gotten rid of altogether. You can look at the storage, the ram, the speed and ipc of the processors, the different graphics processing engines, the caching schemes, the rasterization boards, and understand that they have all been condensed, miniaturized, and integrated into modern components. You would have to look up all those details in any given modern component, which can be hard to find sometimes, and then add up all the differences between them. Plus, many of the components that machine used, are not even used anymore, due to people figuring out simpler ways to do things with code.
As an SGI tech support employee from 1997 to 1999, I was trained on the hardware and software side of these systems and their kin, some of which could fill an entire server room. The owners of SGI machines were primarily Hollywood studios, game developers, University research centers, NASA and the U.S. national laboratories. They did run games (BZFLAG) and VR (DACTYL NIGHTMARE), all of which are primitive by today's standards. OpenGL (gfx api) and Irix (OS) were as ahead of their time as the hardware itself. SGI also owned Cray, who's supercomputers were liquid cooled, and exponentially more expensive. In 1999 I showed the 640x480, $200 Sega Dreamcast to one of my SGI engineers (also the first person to excitedly show me Google) and his complaint was that it didn't do Anti-Aliasing. Granted the Onyx was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else graphically, but the price to performance ratio eventually caught up to SGI, and the company didn't change fast enough to stay ahead of the market. RIP. Google now occupies the former SGI HQ.
Yeah I used to work in one of the old SGI buildings that had super low cable trays... SGI definitely didn't think that server racks/rooms would get as tall as they have.
Ahhhh the gool ol' days. We used to eat lunch in the lab (when no one was around of course), sitting on our really expensive "red couch" (Y-MP8) updating UNICOS by hand and sometimes dragging over an Indigo workstation and marveling at the ability to "spin the corvette" in real time or watch the paper airplane demo everyone was so fascinated by. I miss those days. I printed one of those Cray Y-MP mini cases for one of my Raspberry Pi Zero's. Fitting, considering the computing power of both. Cool, but at the same time sad.
David H., I remember your name. :D Spot on about the guy's comment re lack of AA on the Dreamcast, ironically I didn't like the PS1 for the same reason (terrible textures and wobbly geometry); I loved the N64, even though the AA still wasn't there, but the mipmapping was way better. However, the fact that the guy's immediate response was to note the lack of fidelity kinda foreshadowed where SGI went wrong eventually, they focused so much on image quality while ignoring demands for better basic raw performance.
Lol... great analogy xD ... been there done it... in '92 I have even installed a 1-Gigabyte ($2,000) full height HD monstrosity to my tricycle, it was like a huge gas tank with afterburners... he-he
I worked for SGI in the mid 90s at their Salford Quays office (Manchester UK). Best job I ever had. We all had an Indy on our desk and we had a very early email system called Z-Mail. It was the coolest place to work at the time and I was very lucky to get a job in pre-sales there. OpenGL, VRML, early HTML editor called Cosmo, we were years ahead. I still remember the day we got Quake running on an Onyx thanks to John Carmack's special port. We couldn't believe the smoothness and resolution. Then Nvidia came along.... Ah well it was fantastic whilst it lasted.
SGI was a high end company and never failed to replace its market niche with an even smaller one. SGI did develop the custom graphics chips for the Nitendo64. When around '97 or so they spun out MIPS again, SGI said they'd not want anything to do with that gaming stuff. So they passed along the rights to the Nitendo graphics chips to the newly independent MIPS Technologies. And all the licensing that came from that. Right at a time when SGI started to lose money like there was no tomorrow. But it made MIPS Technologies a filthy rich small company. In like late 2005 or so MIPS had $120M in the bank and some 300 employees (from memory). The money to a large degree came from the Nitendo licensing fees and because it was so much - much more than the core processor business - was listed separately on the quarterly results. In the end not only SGI itself could have used that money - it even became the fuse on the bomb leading MIPS into trouble. Inside SGI engineering there were suggestions circulating to enter the graphics market. Management put them down "we don't want anything to do with that low-end PC graphics". Then nVidia came along. One of the things I was doing work on was porting Linux to the Origin 200/2000 series so scalability work on Linux could start before Altix hardware was available. We were the first to ever run Linux on a 128 processor system. For an Origin 2000 that's 9 full size racks. Plus one more for a "few more" disk drives. The first tests were on a 128 processor system with the console under a rotating disco ball. SGI was the king of cool. Ah well it was fantastic whilst it lasted. In like '95 SGI had crossed the 1 billion USD revenue, in '96 every employee from the cleaner to the CEO received a golden wrist watch worth a $1,000. in the 3rd quarter of '97 SGI was expecting to make 20 cents per share. Instead they lost 20 cents per share. The death spiral started picking up speed. The first thing cancelled to save money were the weekly Friday beer busts - which I'm sure were actually were a good investment since they got people talking to each other. Ever seen Google's cool headquarters in Mountain View? SGI built them around '96. Because SGI was the king of cool, of course. Eventually as the company shrunk SGI moved into two of the four buildings it had built on 1600 Crittenden Lane and leased the buildings to Google. It was a horrible deal for SGI, Google ended up paying a rent to SGI lower than the mortgage itself was still paying. Yet during the dark times as the revenue from the core business was dwindling that rent income was so much that SGI in one quarter had to say in its filings that it was a real estate business! I still have a bunch of Origin 200s, Origin 300s, Indigo, Indigo², Indy, O2 and Octanes.
I remember Zmail! It was a snappy Motif tool looking better at Irix because of the libSg.. but no one is remebering showcase - a very complete kind of slide presentation software. which some years later became popular in a package everyone knows today called power point (the only product I highlight as usable from MS) Many things worked in showcase are not easy to achiev in PP today. One could include 3D scenegraph renderings for expl and video of course.
I was 17 years old working as a level designer using this machine to build N64 games in 1996. From Dpaint to this was amazing. Happy days. Thanks for the great video. X
I used this in work to design oil rigs in the 90s and produce one of the first fly through movies. Took a weekend to compile all of the frames. Brought back memories. Thank you.
SGI's were awesome in their day! As an artist & animator, not only did the 64-bit processor 's kick the shit out of Intel/Windows 32-bit options at the time, but the whole SGI Operating System was designed for artists to work in a specialized graphics-oriented environment. The File Manager was basically an image management application in its own right. Still, having to run several of these (not to mention the refrigerator-sized Onyx Reality Engine series) was way to expensive for anything except feature film work or scientific visualization.
I worked with this machine and its relatives back in the late 80s and early 90s. Actually took a week long maintenance class at the SGI facility in Mountain View, CA. I have had that front ramp down so many times I hate to count. And usually had several people breathing down my neck asking how much longer it would be. Mostly, the machine just ran. Too bad SGI stopped innovating. I really liked their stuff. Thanks for the video. I am amazed at how much you know about this thing. It brought back a lot of memories.
The Amiga was definitely ahead of it's time and a great machine but the capabilities of AGA versus this is really not much a comparison, for obvious reasons.
Well yeah, but the Amiga's price was just a fraction of an SGI, and while a stock machine couldn't do hi-res real-time ray-tracing, there were programs which took overnight to render it. Later on they had a bunch of turbo-cards and AAA (Amiga Advanced Architecture) graphics which were able to do it in real-time. They were obviously in different leagues (including price), but the Amiga was the closest competitor to SGI, while the PC couldn't even touch it at that time... sure that has changed too by the mid 90's ;)
5:58 What I really admire about the Oynx is how quiet it is. I'd only slightly notice it when practising the drums in a small reflective room along to Megadeth booming from my Rokit 5s at 110dB.
so like 25 years from now they are gonna look back at our quantum computer prototypes and laugh while watching the video on their quantum smartphones with 16TB ram
Actually, we're going to go down in personal computing power, and moving towards faster internet, using cloud servers for computing power. Kind of a shame if you ask me.
there won't be RAM, there will just be storage. Non-volatile memory is the future, and what better way to do it than make the entire storage device double as memory?
200000$ in house decorations means you are beyond rich. Maybe a billionaire. Most people don't even have 100000$ so 250000$ in decorations would be insane. Most people also only have 2000 - 5000$ of furniture in their house
Yeah, SGI used that in several systems. In early versions of the Power Indigo 2 (R8000 version), it got so hot that the paper would smoulder. They had to respin the processor module to fix this. But that was SGI: already releasing hardware before it was actually finished. "Throw it over the wall, let support fix it."
@@MMedic23 Yea, it's just not as apparent as it is in older hardware like this. Some server computers still start in similar fashion. Such as a lcd with post messages and such. Otherwise most computers start up so quickly now days it's as if they no longer have a startup sequence!
@jolena auvuya < Your 2017 system may be more powerful, but this was 25 years ago when the internet was in its infancy, that's the whole point of this video.
The Onyx was much more powerful than the N64, meaning most games had to be downgraded in order to run on it. Some games like Mario 64 were made on their Indie workstation, which closely matched the N64's power.
Most movies from that era used SGIs, it was the main platform for IFFFS apps. Star Trek VI, The Abyss, The English Patient, Jurassic Park, the list is very long. Personally, I helped a bit with the productions for JP2 Lost World and SW Ep. II.
+angjoysnow: They probably film the scene, import it to the SGI computer. Then design the 3D models. Add the textures. Do the animation. Render the animation on top of the film and export it back out to VHS or something. I heard that for Jurassic Park, the modelling software used was SoftImage. They call such software CAM = Computer Aided Modeling.
Its a widely known fact lmao. Jurassic Park as well. Hell Donkey Kong Country sprites were made on this thing, then pre rendered for the SNES to handle.
I actually used one of these when they first came out. The company that I worked for bought it to do analysis on plastic parts. The spinning jet and the buttons brought back a lot of old memories!
I used one as well for special effects in a post production studio. Was state of the art in its day and the suite was something like $750 per hour to clients...
@@deadpixel_1614 That's still pretty good man. You should upgrade to core2quad. If possible upgrade to a lga775 g43 motherboard which supports ddr3 ram. DDR2 is too slow for gaming, it limits the total performance.
When I was getting my CS degree I saw these machines and at the time it was incredible. I hope you appreciate what you've got there and how jealous I am. To me it's one of the coolest things to see young people appreciating old school tech, especially sgi, which was absolutely unreal at the time. You do a great job on these videos but you dish out info like a machine gun. Amazing work. Even though an Onyx is completely impractical, I would love to have one to play with. Glad you got one and an can fathom what it meant to people like myself at the time. I would like to see a video of how you repaired it and got it running, you're an amazing kid to even want to do that.
@@nossy232323 rtx 6900 with 10% more performance for 200% more dollars = ez profit = super improved now play 4k at 70 fps not 60. Oh yea and raytracing with 12 fps cuz human eye cant see games that support raytracing.
The year this came out my family got our first computer. It was a 33mhz processor 486 with a 250mb hard drive and 2mb of ram. You had to bypass the windows 3.1 startup to play DOOM. My mom saw it on TV and bought it for $2,000 because they had the Britannica eycyclopedia CD and showed 144p videos of whales on it. Gas was only 78 cents a gallon that summer. Freakin birthday cards these days have chips with more processing power in them.
I actually had a 100Mhz overclocked CPU back in '93, with a ton of heat-sink on top of it, and an Orchid "high-end" video card... I remember it cost me a fortune. xD
My first machine was a 486 dx 33 too xD Forgot how much RAM it had or storage (obviously not a lot by today's standards) but I do remember it having a 1mb cirrus logic video card too xD
I was in my 30s in the 90s. I was a programmer for companies like Control Data and Scientific Games. I remember SGI had a stellar reputation for graphics, and I think they also did some custom rendering for movies, too. Also, after I saw Super Mario 64 running on the display Nintendo 64 at Target, I had to have one. Pretty neat how SGI more or less introduced 3D super-computing power to the masses. Very nice video! You have an impressive knowledge of this machine. I'm glad someone like you is around to look after it. I have subscribed. All good wishes.
Sorry, Tehf. I misspoke. I meant to say Software Sciences International. I confused the two because the were in buildings close to each other and in my memory, I just picked the wrong one. It's been a long time. At ssi, we programmed in 8080 assembly language for projects like Hospital supply inventories. I have a friend who works at Scientific Games now, and it's mostly slot machines and video gambling machines. I don't know what else they do.
I was used it in 1990s in Japanese TV station. Do you know the Onyx does not support MIDI by bug, though it is supported in catalog description? The SGI replied us that "No body tried to use MIDI in Onyx ever, so we do not know the bug". So I had to make some serial interface (RS232C) devices to cover it. Anyway, that was happy days, and we got much money around Onyx.
Exactly, I remember being very excited about upgrading from 2 to 4 MB of RAM! Running 3D Studio for DOS! Being amazed the first time I pusged open on a CD drawer! LOL
No wonder people at the time thought VR was just around the corner with machines like this, unfortunately they would have to wait another 25 years to get it. I remember 93, we just got 14k internet for the first time on AOL, I was 6. The only games our computer could run were things like tank wars on floppy disk.
How many people in 93 actually knew this existed though? Not only that, when I hear the price of 250000$, I know it has a long way to go before becoming mainstream. P.S VR still isn't here. I do not consider wearing goggles with screens in them and joy sticks/motion sensors in your hands to be VR.
Thanks for making this Dodoid! You're understanding of "how we got here" will give you a great perspective on today's technology. I sold many of these and Onyx 2's - Larger systems to run simulators and VR Caves. A few systems were in the millions - I worked at Apple in 1988-1993 and then to SGI. It was a great place! IRIX and MIPS forever!
Fun thing is: I did lan parties with SGI machines. in the 1990s I worked for SGI Germany and every now and then friends and I met in the office to play some rounds of BZFlag.
@Zack Burkhart nope. Current standart for ddr3 is 1600MHz and 2666MHz for DDR4. DDR4 is coming up right now with >4000MHz. Back these days the ram was at a few 10 or 100 of MHz but i dont hv Numbers.
Crazy how this computer had some specs that were out of reach to the average consumer for another 15-20 years after this computer was made. The ability to use 16GBs of ram in 1993 is INSANE! The processor clock speeds are really the only thing that would make this computer outdated by the early 2000's.
Thanks for bringing back old memories! I used all sorts of SGIs in those times for computer animation and I loved them. System administration on IRIX was a joy compared to Windows nowadays and even if everything was slower than now, we had much more fun at work. It's great to see that here are still enthusiasts keeping these machines alive!
I used to go to Comdex and stand at the SGI booth with an aching heart. Years later when companies were unloading them, I got my own Indigo with software. It has been idle for a while but I am putting it back into commission. It will be so sweet to hear the startup chimes again.
FINALLY! UA-cam recommends me something im actually interested in... Nice video. I had no knowledge of these machines and enjoyed the video. Will there be more content like this in the future? I need more.. lol. Seriously, good job on the video. Very informative, and you are easy to understand.
That was a really great and informative video! I worked on an SGI Indy back in 1996 (Yes, I am old!) when I was a Animation student. I never knew what it looked like inside (Obviously, they were not going to let students peek inside such an expensive system.) At the time we used Soft Image as the 3D software. It was a great learning experience and I now teach 3D graphics and game development. Excellent work, I wish you much success with your channel, keep it up!
I started using the SGI Indigo in 1993-the same year Jurassic Park came out. Switching from Mac to Indigo to work with Softimage was a game-changer for me. I was blown away by the speed and the IRIX operating system; it was the absolute best technology of its time. However, SGI hardware was extremely expensive, and I eventually had to go back to Mac. I ended up selling the Indigo for very little money after a few years, which I regret, as it was one of the best experiences I've had. Later, when Apple launched its Unix-based system from NeXT, it felt a lot like SGI IRIX. It's a pity SGI went bankrupt-those computers were incredibly powerful and ahead of their time, capable of holding up even with today’s systems 🤣😂
I was working with this machine back in the days. It was already outdated with the Onyx2 and Octane, but still, it was working great, Irix is super reliable and the power was quite good. BTW the supercomputer vs workstation thing you mentioned. I know there were some companies running it as a VR engine but I guess most sales went to the movie industry and we strictly used these machines as workstations mostly running Flame/Inferno software from Discreet or Cineon from Kodak or Illusion/Matador from Parallax. They were brilliant 3D workstations too, back then the first professional 3D software was Softimage 3|D (the software they used for "Jurassic Park") and Power Animator by Wavefront (today Maya bought by Autodesk) and they were only running on Irix in the beginning. However, if you like SGI in general then obviously you like the onyx and onyx2 but IMO I always liked the Octane and Octane2 way more, coz it was easier to handle and the difference in performance was not huge. The Octane2 with dual 400Mhz and v8 graphics was the hell of a machine back then and a lot of people used these workstations till 2005 or 2010.
Oh the memories. I was in the machine room at POP Film in '96 with a room packed with about half a dozen Onyx2's with the InfiniteReality Engines (the tall, fridge-sized units), and a dozen Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. These were running Flame, Inferno, and Cineon for compositing and Houdini, SoftImage, Alias Power Animator and Wavefront for 3D. I was working over 100 hours per week in that freezing room. In addition to each Onyx's internal system of deafening fans, we also had a massive, van-sized climate control machine in the room. All the fans did was expel hot air from each machine. When that giant climate control machine failed once, it let out a loud, piercing alarm, its thermometer reached 99F within a minute or two, and stopped because the red LED display had only 2 digits. After "99F", it changed to "E r r" as the heat continued rising. It was Saturday well after midnight, I called my direct supervisor who had me call and wake up the EP of digital production. We were already behind schedule on a MAJOR Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster and my EP asked my 22 year old, struggling college student ass to "make the call." So I made the call, and asked all the animators and compositors to save their work and shut down immediately. Of course they objected and showed up to the scene of the disaster to ask WTF is going on. The machine room was sweltering so security opened the back door for ventilation and the engineer from upstairs had his shirt off working on the climate control system. I also had my shirt off running in to initiate the long, arduous shutdown procedures on half a dozen Onyxes and a dozen Impacts and back out to breathe. The keyboards were really warm, metal surfaces were hot, and we were both literally dripping with sweat. My heart was racing. I'd just made the call to shut down production on a massive Hollywood studio blockbuster that was already a week behind schedule. Long story short: I made the right call, no data or hardware was lost, and the problem ended up being that all the fuses in the climate control machine had blown. P.S. I also ended up at R+H years later. I remember "Hues", "Rhythm", and "And", in addition to the in-house compositor "Ice", the 3D tracking software "VooDoo", and of course the scripting language "Parsley." I primarily used VooDoo, Parsley, and occasionally Ice. One of the best companies I've ever worked at. R.I.P. R+H.
Yeah, both Ice and VooDoo crashed on me too. Honestly, I don't think the proprietary Red Hat build was up to par. When our PCs running Red Hat were under heavy load, the KDE buttons because unresponsive and their targets shifted requiring me to click slightly below and to their right to click. Miss John's Friday financials slideshow and the BBQs!
Ahh. Memories :) This was my development machine back then - we were doing a 4 channel sim with motion base. The price isnt quite right: Thats the "base" model. Depending on what cards you purchased. You could buy: RM Cards (Render Managers) GU Cards (Graphics Units) - these were like GPUs but you needed good RMs to have good performance. Memory Cards And some video specialist cards (video in/out and channel managers/mixers). Cards generally cost between 25-50K _each_ And with a decent setup you could have 250K of just cards :) The SGI guys I dealt with here in Aus, were generally useless - they sold us very shit RM's and GU's and basically had a machine that was very poor in 3D performance for the machines abilities. Once we replaced the RMs and received some great assistance from the US tech support, we were rocking. It was my first ever development in shaders (I wrote some rain, and snow shaders for the train sim) and posted solutions for particle rendering on Performer. Good times. Fond memories. Thanks for the video - its a very clean/nice example of a great machine. Btw. Their memory and processor system actually became the industry standard, and is still used by Intel and AMD today :) .. The crossbar system was crazy, and awesome :)
How far ahead of consumer machines were these things? Assuming that the architecture was compatible, would you be able to run something with similar graphical fidelity to half life 2, from 2004, on it? The demos obviously aren't stretching the capabilities of the hardware, so I'm really curious what $250k would get you in 1993.
@@freddyli5356 yes still working with simulators in defence and AR and VR systems as well. Its been around 25years of electronics, PLC programming, games programming and simulation architecture. Some awesome experiences especially with SGI and the Onyx's bigger brother the Origin 3000 series. Good times :)
The paper is a non-conductive barrier to prevent an accidental misalignment of a card, a component outside of spec, or conductive dust from contacting and shorting the card to the metal case. It's basically because the specs for the cards allow for components to possibly go all the way to the edge, and well, adding more to the case is way more then expensive then a sheet of "fish paper". These and the bigger cabinet systems were pretty fun to play with and work on back in the 90's they powered a lot early VR research tools. And although annoying the keyboard design wasn't a big issue as most of the time you ran them headless, and just used the serial port to do base of tasks until networking was up.
Good to see new blood with so much enthusiasm towards really geeky stuff. Thanks for finally bringing me up to speed on Silicon graphics, three decades after we used it as a milestone in computing in our vocabulary as little geeks.
That's a Desk Side Onyx, they only came with 2-4 cpus. Full size Onyx looked like a refrigerator and had up to 24 cpus. I worked on both of these, including the Crimson when I was an intern at a VFX studio in 1995. Later that year, we beta-tested SoftImage 3D (owned by Microsoft at that point) which had just been released a Windows NT version. The PC of choice was from a company called Intergraph which had one of the most powerful graphics cards available for Windows NT at the time. Side by side render speed comparison, the Intergraph machine was MUCH faster than the Crimson we had in the studio. This was the beginning of the end for SGI, they never took the PC threat seriously and ended up coming to the PC market several years later with an expensive, unreliable workstation which I ended up using at another studio for a time. Within 10 years, SGIs disappeared from all the studios except for use with Flame, Inferno and Smoke. Which are high end compositing and VFX applications that relied on the SGIs hardware and super fast throughput. Eventually, they too migrated away from the SGIs and now run on souped up PC workstations instead.
This is indeed how the story went. We had a lot of Indy's , Challenges and later O2s in the office. I used to work for the european distributor of SGI so I got my hands on lots of thoses machines. Even had one at home. I used Newtek's Lightwave on it to try go get into 3D modelling.
I have no SGIs but I do regret selling my Indy. Never got into 3D professionally. But I am doing some modelling using Blender though on a Macbook Pro. It sucks at rendering though. Cool that you still own all those machines. I don't think my wife would have these lingering in the house ;-)
@@marander512 I started on the Amiga, first Imagine 3d, then Lightwave 1.0. I didn't even know they made an Irix version of Lightwave. Such an odd platform to port to at that time.
Also, SGI proprietry hardware doesn't help either. Where as you can run out to buy a generic mouse for the intergraph, you need to get back to the dealer to buy a simple mouse. Poweranimator was also the software of choice for these machines. Amazing that a Nvidia GTX now has more computing power on a PCIe bus than this behemoth. I was starting out with 3d and back then, 3dstudio ver 4 on ms dos was the main option for smaller studios.
Ah this brings back memories. I used to work at an oil company with a full size Onyx. It was used to load seismic data which was then projected onto a 180 degree screen. The geologists would manipulate the huge chunks of data to look for oil. At lunch, though, we would play Doom.
I'm a 40's architectural illustrator and i remember those really well, nobody could afford them unless you work for universal studios. lol. my humble setups were voodoo video cards from 3dfx Interactive, later Nvidia, running 3dmax from kinetics later Autodesk, nice video.
Yep, in the late 80's, early 90's I had a $5,000usd fully tricked out custom PC with an Orchid video card, 16MB DIMM ram, 1GB hard drive one of those full height 5.25' monstrosities which cost $2,500usd basically half price of the entire pc. Just imagine what would $5K buy you today ;) Nowadays we have 64GB to 256GB SDCards on smartphones in our pockets... talk about tech advancements.
My office had at least two onyx's that I remember, I used to use an O2 for my work and there were several indigos(?) and SunSparcs around too. The maintenance contracts for these things were 10s of thousands of dollars every year as well.
did own one. i restored her and sold her, plus, every time that i took it for a ride, park and walk away from it, when i was back, 10 guys taking selfies lying on top of the hood or begging for a ride. i have really bad social skills, you know....
Couple of extra points worth noting: - The rack system supports up to three gfx pipes (adding a 3rd requires an additional card cage and 3-phase power), for a total of up to 18 output channels. - The Challenge server model, not having gfx, could support more CPUs, up to 36. The Onyx/Challenge racks I bought both had 24x R10K/195MHz (2MB). - Performance of RE2 depends very much on the number of RMs installed, as do various features such as available pixel depths and video formats. Dodoid's system appears to have up to 2 RM4s, the range being 1, 2 or 4 per pipe, using either RM4 boards (4MB texture memory) or RM5s (16MB TRAM). The TRAM does not combine between RMs, whereas the VRAM does, which is 40MB per board. - The default SCSI disks are HVD (High Voltage Differential, 20MB/sec), though the buses can be altered to run SE at 10MB/sec. Be very careful when working with such systems not to connect the wrong type of disk, or to the wrong connector.
Nice electric radiator for cold winter days. Adequate settings. I used to work on SGI workstation back in the days when 3D animation was = to Softimage and the Onyx was always set alone in a large room where 'the expensive stuff no one had the right to touch' used to stand. It's funny to see a kid (no offence) playing around with that very same stuff a few years later. I still have a piece of SGI harware though : the screwdriver they used to pack with the Indy's optional extension board. Very handy screwdriver. Still usefull as day one when the rest of the hardware is now just crap.
do you happen to know if theres a dump online for the graphics library? i was interested in having the textures myself but i cant seem to find them anywhere
@@padmad3k63 I wonder if we will ever get to a point where we just don't need more and more space. Maybe in the future, hardly anybody will use local storage, and everyone will keep their files in the cloud, aside from maybe stuff like any embarrassing porn that you wouldn't want leaked. If we ever have affordable terabit speed internet, maybe processing will all move to the cloud as well. At home we'll have nothing but a dummy terminal. Tablets will be cheap bc the real hardware is in the cloud so you have a monthly payment to use it, bundled with a home pc, game console etc for discounts. Then you will no longer need to keep upgrading hardware at home. You pay for a higher tier package to get the better graphics in games, more storage, faster tablet, etc.
I bought one of those HD's. I was thinking it was a Seagate SCSI Barracuda, but on second thought, it may have been a WD Caviar drive. Too long ago to remember. I spent about $5000 on a computer for graphics rendering work (which was more than I earned working all summer long while in college!). If I recall correctly, RAM was running about $35 per MB at that time, so it was insanely expensive as well. Most computers only had a few MB in them.
whoa, 1280x1024 resolution in 1993? 640x400 was considered excellent at that time. The first PC game I knew of that had 800x600 graphics was the Diablo 2 expansion, which came out in 2001.
Actually I have to correct myself, SimCity 2000 came out in 1993 and indeed supported 800x600. Of course, 1280x1024 as a standard resolution in 1993 is still massively cool for a workstation.
That serial port on the backplane goes round to the bottom front, you can use it to 'terminal login' if there is a problem during boot leading to the screen not working. You could use the 'terminal' application that came with Windows and an actual serial Rs-232 cable rather than a 422 cable (harder to come by, then) to login, much like how you might 'ssh' into a machine today. Back in the day these machines came with a £40K support contract, with lots of special stickers over door panels so that the SGI engineer would know if you had been in there. Hence you would never see the internals unless you had an SGI guy in upgrading a board for you. Service was actually pretty good and you could get same day repairs, obviously on site. All Onyxs were 'clustered', e.g. for film and TV in the UK that meant Soho, London. So it was relatively easy for SGI to do support because their machines would only end up in small geographical locations. So, thanks for the vid, back in the day there were production demands plus support contracts that meant that nobody could spend all day taking these boxes apart in their parent's bedrooms! I 'had' an Infinite Reality 2 version with all of the boxes to allow for digital video out. Before that I had a Crimson, which was a very large box for one CPU. I also had a few O2s on my desk with an Indy tucked away in the mix too, however, the cost of all of this hardware was dwarfed by the cost of the broadcast kit that everything was linked up to. Clients paid £10K a day so 'my' Onyx did bring in millions.
Wow. Very well done, both content and production. We had a similar one to this unit when I worked at Global Village in Mountain View in '93-'95 -- though my memory is that it had a more "art deco" purple front -- so probably not a $250K unit. Still, I remember playing with some of the demos you showed. (As for me, I was writing Motorola CISC code for an office communications server product on Sun SPARC workstations. Ugh!)
Not only the hardware, even the OS came with unusual font style, a really cool theming of the elsewhere always default grayish and ugly Motif widget set!! A few years ago my daughter saw their mouse pad and found it cool and nice to use 'not so standard' she said - true words. It was always an honor to work with SGI computers for that!
Hmm, very interesting to ponder what might be possible with a deskside IR system with a highly optimised engine, but it would need to be a complete rewrite to match the hw, no kind of port would be any good. IR can certainly run Quake2 and Quake3 pretty well, so who knows with decent coding. Huge differences though in what functions are support which would mean a lot of the visual effects in Crysis would have to be left behind, eg. SGI's gfx tech doesn't have pixel shaders, that hadn't been invented yet. Some of its staff moved to NVIDIA, took the IR base concept with them, removed all the stuff not needed for games, squased it onto a single board on a modern process size, voila the GF256 was born, the first PC GPU with a hw GE (it has the same GLperf specs as IR). SGI did argue internally at least once about making gaming consumer GPUs, but it didn't go anywhere, likely the resellers didn't want to have to deal with ordinary cheapo consumers and SGI bowed to that. Pity really as in theory a scalable product based on the RCP from the N64 would have been viable, but the whole Nintendo deal kinda soured as SGI failed to make much money once the console price went down, perhaps not realising that the real money in console gaming comes from the games sales, not the initial console sales. Still, who knows, one could probably make something pretty cool, given how impressive some of the real-life apps and demos are for IR, but Crysis per se, no, that's just way too demanding. :D Love that game btw, still playing Warhead atm. RE2 though, definitely not, it's just too old, even with RM5s. The GE speed and fill rate just aren't there for anything seriously detailed. Remember it's not just about triangles/sec either, eg. gaming hw has 3D functions such as 2-sided textures which pro hw doesn't need, all sorts of optimisations on one side or the other. Ian.
+Kolja Wilms: Nope. Back in 1993, OpenGL was brand new. I think it was designed in 1992 or 1991 and it was competing with about 15 other 3D APIs. The great thing about OpenGL was that the specification was open. You can even downloading it today for the latest and greatest GL 4.5 (www.opengl.org). This thing probably supports GL 1.1. There is no support for multitexturing. No vertex or fragment shaders. I imagine it can do hardware stencil buffer while most consumer gfx boards from 1995 to 2000 could not. I think GL 1.2 came out in ~1998. Shader support in the form of extensions came along after 2003 I think.
You see how warped that board was? Imagine that board being on the very end of the row, close to the side. The pink paper could have saved you a 2nd mortgage.
Having used this machine along with O2s in the 90s to render stuff, it is literally mindblowing that a run of the mill integrated graphics chip is about 1000x as powerful. I remember the SGI reps going around my college trying to sell more of them. The software license for Alias which was the precursor of Maya could run up to 30grand. I remember pricing an Onyx II maxed out in 96 and getting back 780k quote. Then a few years later it all went bust when you could run Maya on Windows for under 10k with better performance thanks to the advent of faster graphics cards. RIP SGI we all wanted one but now looking back, it was just a vanity thing unless you were rendering Jurassic Park or Toy Story as a business.
Yes, I remember them too, they were using them for 3D protein modeling, not sure it was the exact same machine though, in my unit they had a dedicated air conditioned computer room with huge Silicon Graphics workstations.
The boring answer is probably that you'd buy a decent enough workstation for < $10k and spend the rest on rendering servers. A rack full of high-spec x86-64 servers isn't as _cool_, but it's a lot of computing power.
It could take MUCH more in terms of hard drives, mine is pretty "average Onyx" storage-wise. I read an SGI document a few months ago that was talking about setting up a server for a 300GB database on the Challenge XL (effectively the same thing as an Onyx rack, minus the graphics hardware).
I remember my friends and I being amazed at these things back in college in the mid 90s. The things they were claiming with these bordered on witchcraft at that time. So glad people like you are keeping the spirit of SGI alive.
Nice presentation on the inner workings of an SGI Onyx, a juggernaut of a machine. In the 90s I learned scripting and 3D modeling/animation while a few Onyxes were in the server room at school. SGIs machines were also in each classroom. Scripting brought out the machine's hidden power. That's one reason why Terminator 2 looks as good as it does. SGI made true dream machines. Again, nice work on the video, and thanks for showing the inside. Now I know why SGI computers cost so much.
Google is Evil, alas I'm out of space, already have four Onyx systems, two Onyx2s, an Onyx3800 and three Crimsons. :D I could buy the parts, but not if it's outside Europe, not worth the shipping & fees. Best place to advertise it would be forums.irix.cc. Kandi Klover, finding one for sale is luck of the draw. Keep an eye on ebay, contact local hardware brokers and ask them to call you if they get anything that says "Silicon Graphics" on it, post a WTD advert to the above forum.
I wonder if they used on onyx supergraphics computer to make the models for Lost in Space that 90s film that advertised silicon graphics pretty directly
They did indeed, and I think the name drop in the movie was part of the deal to help the production, but it is without doubt one of the cringiest company plugs ever, really wish they hadn't done that. I remember sinking into my seat in the cinema, though of course nobody else in the audience got the reference.
I'm back!
4 AM here :)
It's been a while...
Perfect timing for me, breakfast telly. :D
10am vid nice :)
I just saw the notification in my e-mail and thought, "Oh nice, the SGI dude is back!" By the way, 20 minutes is relatively short. I've watched your SGI videos over and over, countless times, and in fact, after this, I'll probably head back and watch it again! Keep it up dude! You were missed.
He had to sell all his furniture and his shoes to pay for it.
Jordan Wharton , 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Nice
hilarious :D
Those shoes sold for 250k$ in the 90's
fede Those some big purple shoes, lol.
Wow what a crazy machine! Also, 16GB of RAM??? In 1993?? Holy balls...
Thats what i have XD
Amazing isnt it
I remember having around 300 mb of Ram
My gaming rig only has 8, I feel inferior ;-(
I only got 8 lol
8gb ddr3 or ddr4 is far superior to even 32 gb of the ram of that time
When buying a computer to last the next five years isn't good enough, and you want a machine that will last for the next twenty. :-P
Wow.. that's a lot of computing power for 1993. Most machines were running around 25 to 66 mhz around that time with a single CPU.
And graphical power compared to XGA or even VGA graphics of the time
Hey, neat to see you here.
I know. In today terms what graphics cards would compare with the power it had?
Hi there! Yep, there's a reason it cost that much. It's a beast of a machine. I love your channel, by the way. Let me know if you ever want to do anything SGI-related in one of your videos. I'd be glad to help.
Mathcubes, that is actually not the easiest question to answer. The system is not just a graphics card equivalent. It would be a lot more comparable to a pc as a whole. The difficulty of comparing it to modern systems is that the chip architecture itself, and the way the parts and silicon are layed out on those pcb's, along with the os and software, are so much different than a pc. There are many chips on those boards that have been absorbed into other chips, or gotten rid of altogether. You can look at the storage, the ram, the speed and ipc of the processors, the different graphics processing engines, the caching schemes, the rasterization boards, and understand that they have all been condensed, miniaturized, and integrated into modern components. You would have to look up all those details in any given modern component, which can be hard to find sometimes, and then add up all the differences between them. Plus, many of the components that machine used, are not even used anymore, due to people figuring out simpler ways to do things with code.
"What kind of computer do you use?"
"A desk."
"A desktop?"
"No, a desk computer."
Technically it was a "deskside". You could wheel a desk up next to it to "extend your desktop".
🤣
As an SGI tech support employee from 1997 to 1999, I was trained on the hardware and software side of these systems and their kin, some of which could fill an entire server room. The owners of SGI machines were primarily Hollywood studios, game developers, University research centers, NASA and the U.S. national laboratories. They did run games (BZFLAG) and VR (DACTYL NIGHTMARE), all of which are primitive by today's standards. OpenGL (gfx api) and Irix (OS) were as ahead of their time as the hardware itself. SGI also owned Cray, who's supercomputers were liquid cooled, and exponentially more expensive. In 1999 I showed the 640x480, $200 Sega Dreamcast to one of my SGI engineers (also the first person to excitedly show me Google) and his complaint was that it didn't do Anti-Aliasing. Granted the Onyx was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else graphically, but the price to performance ratio eventually caught up to SGI, and the company didn't change fast enough to stay ahead of the market. RIP. Google now occupies the former SGI HQ.
Epic, info David, what where you most recently working on.
You know since the biggest tech companies live in Silicon Valley, I aways wondered what happened to Silicon Graphics and I think I know now
Yeah I used to work in one of the old SGI buildings that had super low cable trays... SGI definitely didn't think that server racks/rooms would get as tall as they have.
Ahhhh the gool ol' days. We used to eat lunch in the lab (when no one was around of course), sitting on our really expensive "red couch" (Y-MP8) updating UNICOS by hand and sometimes dragging over an Indigo workstation and marveling at the ability to "spin the corvette" in real time or watch the paper airplane demo everyone was so fascinated by. I miss those days. I printed one of those Cray Y-MP mini cases for one of my Raspberry Pi Zero's. Fitting, considering the computing power of both. Cool, but at the same time sad.
David H., I remember your name. :D Spot on about the guy's comment re lack of AA on the Dreamcast, ironically I didn't like the PS1 for the same reason (terrible textures and wobbly geometry); I loved the N64, even though the AA still wasn't there, but the mipmapping was way better. However, the fact that the guy's immediate response was to note the lack of fidelity kinda foreshadowed where SGI went wrong eventually, they focused so much on image quality while ignoring demands for better basic raw performance.
16 gb ram in the 90's is like sticking rocket boosters to a tricycle.
Lol... great analogy xD ... been there done it... in '92 I have even installed a 1-Gigabyte ($2,000) full height HD monstrosity to my tricycle, it was like a huge gas tank with afterburners... he-he
Not with that SGI. You just saw the Demo's
i dont got 16 gb or ram on my 5k imac
In 1993 my PC (my first one, a 80386) had 640KB of RAM and 20MB of harddrive.
Hell Yeah!!!!!!!!!
I worked for SGI in the mid 90s at their Salford Quays office (Manchester UK). Best job I ever had. We all had an Indy on our desk and we had a very early email system called Z-Mail. It was the coolest place to work at the time and I was very lucky to get a job in pre-sales there. OpenGL, VRML, early HTML editor called Cosmo, we were years ahead. I still remember the day we got Quake running on an Onyx thanks to John Carmack's special port. We couldn't believe the smoothness and resolution. Then Nvidia came along.... Ah well it was fantastic whilst it lasted.
SGI was a high end company and never failed to replace its market niche with an even smaller one.
SGI did develop the custom graphics chips for the Nitendo64. When around '97 or so they spun out MIPS again, SGI said they'd not want anything to do with that gaming stuff. So they passed along the rights to the Nitendo graphics chips to the newly independent MIPS Technologies. And all the licensing that came from that. Right at a time when SGI started to lose money like there was no tomorrow.
But it made MIPS Technologies a filthy rich small company. In like late 2005 or so MIPS had $120M in the bank and some 300 employees (from memory). The money to a large degree came from the Nitendo licensing fees and because it was so much - much more than the core processor business - was listed separately on the quarterly results. In the end not only SGI itself could have used that money - it even became the fuse on the bomb leading MIPS into trouble.
Inside SGI engineering there were suggestions circulating to enter the graphics market. Management put them down "we don't want anything to do with that low-end PC graphics". Then nVidia came along.
One of the things I was doing work on was porting Linux to the Origin 200/2000 series so scalability work on Linux could start before Altix hardware was available. We were the first to ever run Linux on a 128 processor system. For an Origin 2000 that's 9 full size racks. Plus one more for a "few more" disk drives. The first tests were on a 128 processor system with the console under a rotating disco ball. SGI was the king of cool.
Ah well it was fantastic whilst it lasted. In like '95 SGI had crossed the 1 billion USD revenue, in '96 every employee from the cleaner to the CEO received a golden wrist watch worth a $1,000. in the 3rd quarter of '97 SGI was expecting to make 20 cents per share. Instead they lost 20 cents per share. The death spiral started picking up speed. The first thing cancelled to save money were the weekly Friday beer busts - which I'm sure were actually were a good investment since they got people talking to each other.
Ever seen Google's cool headquarters in Mountain View? SGI built them around '96. Because SGI was the king of cool, of course. Eventually as the company shrunk SGI moved into two of the four buildings it had built on 1600 Crittenden Lane and leased the buildings to Google. It was a horrible deal for SGI, Google ended up paying a rent to SGI lower than the mortgage itself was still paying. Yet during the dark times as the revenue from the core business was dwindling that rent income was so much that SGI in one quarter had to say in its filings that it was a real estate business!
I still have a bunch of Origin 200s, Origin 300s, Indigo, Indigo², Indy, O2 and Octanes.
I remember Zmail! It was a snappy Motif tool looking better at Irix because of the libSg.. but no one is remebering showcase - a very complete kind of slide presentation software. which some years later became popular in a package everyone knows today called power point (the only product I highlight as usable from MS)
Many things worked in showcase are not easy to achiev in PP today. One could include 3D scenegraph renderings for expl and video of course.
@@ralfbaechle interesting, thank you!
Wow your a legend dude
I was 17 years old working as a level designer using this machine to build N64 games in 1996. From Dpaint to this was amazing. Happy days. Thanks for the great video. X
I used this in work to design oil rigs in the 90s and produce one of the first fly through movies. Took a weekend to compile all of the frames. Brought back memories. Thank you.
yea back then it was a time restrictor,....but today my 6yo could do it on his nerf tablet in aboult 5min
sure nice made up story 😂 just trying to get likes, how sad
@@GrandMasterKai It’s a pretty plausible story. How the heck do you know?
Gotta love that compile time.
@@GrandMasterKai damn man you're so smart. Must suck knowing you know best all the time!
That moment when a computer from 1993 has twice as much ram as your pc from 2017
Emufasar but prob Cost like 249,500 more
you wrote that in 2k18...
@@ashtenlastname4045 He probably built/bought his PC in 2017
Pomponivs Archibald yes I built it in 2017
That's over 400k with inflation so I don't doubt it lol
Imagine a 250.000$ computer today.
It would have 16 TB Ram
sry 3tb for 250k maybe 250k for 16tb will be a great deal before 2018 end r/dreamer
@Nederlandse Uploads open chrome with 10 tabs maybe
@@Chrixio that's not how it works......
Chrixio are you being serious?
Chrixio that’s not how it works...
SGI's were awesome in their day! As an artist & animator, not only did the 64-bit processor 's kick the shit out of Intel/Windows 32-bit options at the time, but the whole SGI Operating System was designed for artists to work in a specialized graphics-oriented environment. The File Manager was basically an image management application in its own right. Still, having to run several of these (not to mention the refrigerator-sized Onyx Reality Engine series) was way to expensive for anything except feature film work or scientific visualization.
I worked with this machine and its relatives back in the late 80s and early 90s. Actually took a week long maintenance class at the SGI facility in Mountain View, CA. I have had that front ramp down so many times I hate to count. And usually had several people breathing down my neck asking how much longer it would be. Mostly, the machine just ran. Too bad SGI stopped innovating. I really liked their stuff. Thanks for the video. I am amazed at how much you know about this thing. It brought back a lot of memories.
.
I'm sure the repair bill was expensive lol
Back in the late 80's early 90's the Commodore Amiga had similar graphics capabilities for a fraction of the cost... ahhh the good 'ol days.. :)
The Amiga was definitely ahead of it's time and a great machine but the capabilities of AGA versus this is really not much a comparison, for obvious reasons.
Well yeah, but the Amiga's price was just a fraction of an SGI, and while a stock machine couldn't do hi-res real-time ray-tracing, there were programs which took overnight to render it. Later on they had a bunch of turbo-cards and AAA (Amiga Advanced Architecture) graphics which were able to do it in real-time. They were obviously in different leagues (including price), but the Amiga was the closest competitor to SGI, while the PC couldn't even touch it at that time... sure that has changed too by the mid 90's ;)
I don't know how I got here and why I watched the whole thing but it was very interesting and I don't regret it.
Son Goku So you've cheated on Chichi with Kefla
It's very interesting, hard to believe this was a commercial machine, way back then
Sane here
You know your pc is serious when you need a key to boot
Hahahaha
You know the OP is a millennial when he doesn't know that ALL computers had keys at one time.
thetedmang its a Joke bro
@@ghostjaeger4326 Shut the fuck up
@@ghostjaeger4326 We live in a post joke society now grandpa
5:58 What I really admire about the Oynx is how quiet it is. I'd only slightly notice it when practising the drums in a small reflective room along to Megadeth booming from my Rokit 5s at 110dB.
u need rockit 6
Imagine spending $250,000 on a Computer and not being able to play Crysis.
İbne Piçin Tekiyim That’s because crysis came out in 2007
@@ahgagf9902 HOLY SHIT! SERIOUSLY?
try something new and creative.
@@siralfrednobel Your wish is my command!
@@kos4225 go learn some fucking English before you correct someone.
But can it run Crysis?
But can it run Crysis?
Can it run it Crysis 2?
But can it djent?
But.
But wait, can it run Fortnite?? lol
90s 16gb ram?
I want to know 2018 supercomputer, is it has terabyte ram?
A cray XC50 can squeeze up to 256GB per machine.
Actually yes about 3 to 12 terabytes
A common server with Xeon CPUs with the size a bit bigger than gaming PC, can have 2tb of ram, 8 graphic cards, and lots of hard disks.
Currently, the fastest PC in the world "OLCF-4" has 10,000 terabytes of DDR4 RAM or just 10 petabytes
@@davaymyaso7816 what process could utilize anything near that?
That was a real serious monster of a machine in 1993. Well done for picking one up and looking after it!
so like 25 years from now they are gonna look back at our quantum computer prototypes and laugh while watching the video on their quantum smartphones with 16TB ram
@@kentinousss6 man that's crazy 😂
@@kentinousss6 something like this ua-cam.com/video/YJg02ivYzSs/v-deo.html
Actually, we're going to go down in personal computing power, and moving towards faster internet, using cloud servers for computing power. Kind of a shame if you ask me.
there won't be RAM, there will just be storage. Non-volatile memory is the future, and what better way to do it than make the entire storage device double as memory?
16TB RAM? wtf lol
Dang he legit sold everything in his house to buy the pc.
Quality commenting 👌
200000$ in house decorations means you are beyond rich. Maybe a billionaire. Most people don't even have 100000$ so 250000$ in decorations would be insane. Most people also only have 2000 - 5000$ of furniture in their house
@@nickypass861 whoooosh
Esskay you would expect someone with the suicide emoji to be funny ;-;
poor guy even lost his socks :)
15:50
That “thick pink paper “ is anti-grounding insulation. Helps prevent static grounding in case of a close contact.
Yeah, SGI used that in several systems. In early versions of the Power Indigo 2 (R8000 version), it got so hot that the paper would smoulder. They had to respin the processor module to fix this. But that was SGI: already releasing hardware before it was actually finished. "Throw it over the wall, let support fix it."
@@ianf123 Vulcanized paper.
Is there a word for someone who feels nostalgia for something before their time? This guy is doing great things.
zoomer
I love how it basically has a startup sequence, like a dragster.
The Obsolete Geek Its nice see you in here
More like a Jet if you Account for the Sound! lol
Obsolete Geek Nice to see you
Don't all computers have a startup sequence?
@@MMedic23 Yea, it's just not as apparent as it is in older hardware like this. Some server computers still start in similar fashion. Such as a lcd with post messages and such. Otherwise most computers start up so quickly now days it's as if they no longer have a startup sequence!
That's not a computer. That's a space station.
what do you mean, it's to big to be a space..……...
But space itself is big... reeealy big ;)
@jolena auvuya < Your 2017 system may be more powerful, but this was 25 years ago when the internet was in its infancy, that's the whole point of this video.
This is actually quite funny, the first space flights had on-board computers comparable to pocket calculators!
This computer still holds up decently in comparison to computers today tho, besides the price
Fun Fact:
This exact workstation was used to create Nintendo 64 games when Silicon Graphics partnered up with Nintendo.
Know if it created OoT?
The Onyx was much more powerful than the N64, meaning most games had to be downgraded in order to run on it. Some games like Mario 64 were made on their Indie workstation, which closely matched the N64's power.
@@michaelopnv634 i'm saying n64 games were designed using the onyx
@@Tinnesa i'm not sure, but the most popular game it created was super mario 64 and also pilot wings
He literally said that in the video -.-
That logo takes me back. My last CRT monitor was a 21" Silicon Graphics tube.
Little known fact. Terminator Two was done on a SGi machine. The famous scene where the liquid terminator morphs out of the floor.
Most movies from that era used SGIs, it was the main platform for IFFFS apps. Star Trek VI, The Abyss, The English Patient, Jurassic Park, the list is very long. Personally, I helped a bit with the productions for JP2 Lost World and SW Ep. II.
mapesdhs Oh wow, that is so cool Man I LOVE these machines!
+angjoysnow:
They probably film the scene, import it to the SGI computer.
Then design the 3D models. Add the textures. Do the animation. Render the animation on top of the film and export it back out to VHS or something.
I heard that for Jurassic Park, the modelling software used was SoftImage.
They call such software CAM = Computer Aided Modeling.
Whoosh.
Its a widely known fact lmao. Jurassic Park as well. Hell Donkey Kong Country sprites were made on this thing, then pre rendered for the SNES to handle.
I actually used one of these when they first came out. The company that I worked for bought it to do analysis on plastic parts. The spinning jet and the buttons brought back a lot of old memories!
I used one as well for special effects in a post production studio. Was state of the art in its day and the suite was something like $750 per hour to clients...
*Here I am in 2019, still using an 2nd gen core2duo with 2GB ddr3 ram. Never felt so poor before.*
Lol that's worth like £10
Hey man, i feel you. Im in the same boots and i feel you.
@@deadpixel_1614
That's still pretty good man. You should upgrade to core2quad. If possible upgrade to a lga775 g43 motherboard which supports ddr3 ram. DDR2 is too slow for gaming, it limits the total performance.
Just patiently save money bit by bit, you can upgrade it eventually
I've got a core2quad Q6600,3gb ddr2 and Gt 710
It's weird to think that this video is 6 years old, and that it was only 2019. Where has the time gone?
When I was getting my CS degree I saw these machines and at the time it was incredible. I hope you appreciate what you've got there and how jealous I am. To me it's one of the coolest things to see young people appreciating old school tech, especially sgi, which was absolutely unreal at the time. You do a great job on these videos but you dish out info like a machine gun. Amazing work. Even though an Onyx is completely impractical, I would love to have one to play with. Glad you got one and an can fathom what it meant to people like myself at the time. I would like to see a video of how you repaired it and got it running, you're an amazing kid to even want to do that.
imagine how powerful a 250,000 dollar supercomputer would be in 2020...
That's probably just the price of an Nvidia videocard, the way things are going.
@@nossy232323 rtx 6900 with 10% more performance for 200% more dollars = ez profit = super improved now play 4k at 70 fps not 60. Oh yea and raytracing with 12 fps cuz human eye cant see games that support raytracing.
quantum computer 😅
They are called Cisco computers lol. The motherboards they operate can support up to 2 terabytes of ram...
Michael Imray you could probably hack the government with that thing
"What did it cost?"
"Everything"
hahahaha
hahahahaha funny one
ua-cam.com/video/ehcp_lI5CAc/v-deo.html&t=55
I think this video singlehandedly made a lot of people realize how cool SGI's workstations actually are.
The year this came out my family got our first computer. It was a 33mhz processor 486 with a 250mb hard drive and 2mb of ram. You had to bypass the windows 3.1 startup to play DOOM. My mom saw it on TV and bought it for $2,000 because they had the Britannica eycyclopedia CD and showed 144p videos of whales on it. Gas was only 78 cents a gallon that summer. Freakin birthday cards these days have chips with more processing power in them.
Haha same here, I had the 25 mhz 386 and I ran doom on it.
I actually had a 100Mhz overclocked CPU back in '93, with a ton of heat-sink on top of it, and an Orchid "high-end" video card... I remember it cost me a fortune. xD
My first machine was a 486 dx 33 too xD Forgot how much RAM it had or storage (obviously not a lot by today's standards) but I do remember it having a 1mb cirrus logic video card too xD
lmao 144p video.
You needed 4 mb of RAM to play Doom.
I was in my 30s in the 90s. I was a programmer for companies like Control Data and Scientific Games. I remember SGI had a stellar reputation for graphics, and I think they also did some custom rendering for movies, too. Also, after I saw Super Mario 64 running on the display Nintendo 64 at Target, I had to have one. Pretty neat how SGI more or less introduced 3D super-computing power to the masses. Very nice video! You have an impressive knowledge of this machine. I'm glad someone like you is around to look after it. I have subscribed. All good wishes.
I think SGI Workstations were the PRIMARY systems for CG in movies during the 90's, until the move to more proprietary systems.
Did you make any slot games at Scientific Games or were they into other things back then?
Sorry, Tehf. I misspoke. I meant to say Software Sciences International. I confused the two because the were in buildings close to each other and in my memory, I just picked the wrong one. It's been a long time. At ssi, we programmed in 8080 assembly language for projects like Hospital supply inventories. I have a friend who works at Scientific Games now, and it's mostly slot machines and video gambling machines. I don't know what else they do.
Man, this takes me back. Working at SGI was the most fun job I ever had.
Any cool stories/memories from your time there? That's so cool... :)
I was used it in 1990s in Japanese TV station.
Do you know the Onyx does not support MIDI by bug, though it is supported in catalog description?
The SGI replied us that "No body tried to use MIDI in Onyx ever, so we do not know the bug".
So I had to make some serial interface (RS232C) devices to cover it.
Anyway, that was happy days, and we got much money around Onyx.
Back in the day i used to talk to my friend about how 500Mhz PC's were going to be to much to handle for humans
Turns out you were right
Cyka blyat 8ghz
LMFAOOOO
640kb is enough for everyone 😉
Watches on phone with over 2 ghz
16 GB of RAM. In the 1990s. h o l y s h - -
Exactly, I remember being very excited about upgrading from 2 to 4 MB of RAM! Running 3D Studio for DOS! Being amazed the first time I pusged open on a CD drawer! LOL
In those days my AMD 486DX ran at 66MHz and only had 4Mbyte of RAM and a wooping 210Mbyte hard drive.
and 12 years later in 2005 my pc had 64mb ram while this one can have 16gb...
thats RAD dude!!!
Even my laptop has half the RAM....so unfair...
No wonder people at the time thought VR was just around the corner with machines like this, unfortunately they would have to wait another 25 years to get it. I remember 93, we just got 14k internet for the first time on AOL, I was 6. The only games our computer could run were things like tank wars on floppy disk.
lols tank wars. took 10 seconds to update the screen
Omg lol AOL... memories
Yeah... lol.. it was around... we’ve played... and it was pretty decent given when I played it was 98’
Doom 3 Quake 4 i think
How many people in 93 actually knew this existed though?
Not only that, when I hear the price of 250000$, I know it has a long way to go before becoming mainstream.
P.S VR still isn't here. I do not consider wearing goggles with screens in them and joy sticks/motion sensors in your hands to be VR.
Thanks for making this Dodoid! You're understanding of "how we got here" will give you a great perspective on today's technology. I sold many of these and Onyx 2's - Larger systems to run simulators and VR Caves. A few systems were in the millions - I worked at Apple in 1988-1993 and then to SGI. It was a great place! IRIX and MIPS forever!
I feel like this dude watches Doug DeMuro
*T H I S*
Maybe. He's at least 1 t-shirt short.
Hahaha. I thought the same thing
Wheres the doug score though
Why is doug everywhere i go lmfao
Hey bro let's do a lan party!
"Sure man, lemme grab a uhaul!"
Flatl1ne you could always portfoward : ]
Fun thing is: I did lan parties with SGI machines. in the 1990s I worked for SGI Germany and every now and then friends and I met in the office to play some rounds of BZFlag.
16
gigabytes of
RAM
In 1993
My PC has half of that
It's incredibly slow RAM though.
Baffled
skeletonboi faster than what you have
@Zack Burkhart nope. Current standart for ddr3 is 1600MHz and 2666MHz for DDR4. DDR4 is coming up right now with >4000MHz.
Back these days the ram was at a few 10 or 100 of MHz but i dont hv Numbers.
was it SDRAM?
Crazy how this computer had some specs that were out of reach to the average consumer for another 15-20 years after this computer was made. The ability to use 16GBs of ram in 1993 is INSANE! The processor clock speeds are really the only thing that would make this computer outdated by the early 2000's.
Duuude, you went far and beyond with research and documentation of this particular hardware, I must say. Wow, just wow. Keep up the good work, subbed!
Thanks for bringing back old memories! I used all sorts of SGIs in those times for computer animation and I loved them. System administration on IRIX was a joy compared to Windows nowadays and even if everything was slower than now, we had much more fun at work. It's great to see that here are still enthusiasts keeping these machines alive!
I used to go to Comdex and stand at the SGI booth with an aching heart. Years later when companies were unloading them, I got my own Indigo with software. It has been idle for a while but I am putting it back into commission. It will be so sweet to hear the startup chimes again.
I was waiting for you to give it a Doug score at the end... Dod score?
Doug Score FTW!
Car guys ruel!
may be in more doug channel
lRaziel1 he would actually go into detail about it and why you should or should watch it
Lmao! Absolutely agree!!
Your video was really good, It was a time machine back to the days of the computing super expensive devices. Thank you for all the efforts.
FINALLY! UA-cam recommends me something im actually interested in...
Nice video. I had no knowledge of these machines and enjoyed the video. Will there be more content like this in the future? I need more.. lol. Seriously, good job on the video. Very informative, and you are easy to understand.
That was a really great and informative video! I worked on an SGI Indy back in 1996 (Yes, I am old!) when I was a Animation student. I never knew what it looked like inside (Obviously, they were not going to let students peek inside such an expensive system.) At the time we used Soft Image as the 3D software. It was a great learning experience and I now teach 3D graphics and game development. Excellent work, I wish you much success with your channel, keep it up!
Really enjoyed that thank you, what an absolute beast that is, looking forward to more of your videos
I started using the SGI Indigo in 1993-the same year Jurassic Park came out. Switching from Mac to Indigo to work with Softimage was a game-changer for me. I was blown away by the speed and the IRIX operating system; it was the absolute best technology of its time. However, SGI hardware was extremely expensive, and I eventually had to go back to Mac. I ended up selling the Indigo for very little money after a few years, which I regret, as it was one of the best experiences I've had. Later, when Apple launched its Unix-based system from NeXT, it felt a lot like SGI IRIX. It's a pity SGI went bankrupt-those computers were incredibly powerful and ahead of their time, capable of holding up even with today’s systems 🤣😂
I was working with this machine back in the days. It was already outdated with the Onyx2 and Octane, but still, it was working great, Irix is super reliable and the power was quite good. BTW the supercomputer vs workstation thing you mentioned. I know there were some companies running it as a VR engine but I guess most sales went to the movie industry and we strictly used these machines as workstations mostly running Flame/Inferno software from Discreet or Cineon from Kodak or Illusion/Matador from Parallax.
They were brilliant 3D workstations too, back then the first professional 3D software was Softimage 3|D (the software they used for "Jurassic Park") and Power Animator by Wavefront (today Maya bought by Autodesk) and they were only running on Irix in the beginning.
However, if you like SGI in general then obviously you like the onyx and onyx2 but IMO I always liked the Octane and Octane2 way more, coz it was easier to handle and the difference in performance was not huge. The Octane2 with dual 400Mhz and v8 graphics was the hell of a machine back then and a lot of people used these workstations till 2005 or 2010.
Wow thanks for the additional info
Oh, dich kenne ich doch.
Das Internet ist klein.
The Flame / Inferno setup with an Onyx would easily have cost $1million+ back in 93
Oh the memories. I was in the machine room at POP Film in '96 with a room packed with about half a dozen Onyx2's with the InfiniteReality Engines (the tall, fridge-sized units), and a dozen Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. These were running Flame, Inferno, and Cineon for compositing and Houdini, SoftImage, Alias Power Animator and Wavefront for 3D.
I was working over 100 hours per week in that freezing room. In addition to each Onyx's internal system of deafening fans, we also had a massive, van-sized climate control machine in the room. All the fans did was expel hot air from each machine. When that giant climate control machine failed once, it let out a loud, piercing alarm, its thermometer reached 99F within a minute or two, and stopped because the red LED display had only 2 digits. After "99F", it changed to "E r r" as the heat continued rising. It was Saturday well after midnight, I called my direct supervisor who had me call and wake up the EP of digital production. We were already behind schedule on a MAJOR Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster and my EP asked my 22 year old, struggling college student ass to "make the call."
So I made the call, and asked all the animators and compositors to save their work and shut down immediately. Of course they objected and showed up to the scene of the disaster to ask WTF is going on. The machine room was sweltering so security opened the back door for ventilation and the engineer from upstairs had his shirt off working on the climate control system. I also had my shirt off running in to initiate the long, arduous shutdown procedures on half a dozen Onyxes and a dozen Impacts and back out to breathe. The keyboards were really warm, metal surfaces were hot, and we were both literally dripping with sweat. My heart was racing. I'd just made the call to shut down production on a massive Hollywood studio blockbuster that was already a week behind schedule.
Long story short: I made the right call, no data or hardware was lost, and the problem ended up being that all the fuses in the climate control machine had blown.
P.S. I also ended up at R+H years later. I remember "Hues", "Rhythm", and "And", in addition to the in-house compositor "Ice", the 3D tracking software "VooDoo", and of course the scripting language "Parsley." I primarily used VooDoo, Parsley, and occasionally Ice. One of the best companies I've ever worked at. R.I.P. R+H.
Yeah, both Ice and VooDoo crashed on me too. Honestly, I don't think the proprietary Red Hat build was up to par. When our PCs running Red Hat were under heavy load, the KDE buttons because unresponsive and their targets shifted requiring me to click slightly below and to their right to click.
Miss John's Friday financials slideshow and the BBQs!
Ahh. Memories :) This was my development machine back then - we were doing a 4 channel sim with motion base. The price isnt quite right: Thats the "base" model.
Depending on what cards you purchased. You could buy:
RM Cards (Render Managers)
GU Cards (Graphics Units) - these were like GPUs but you needed good RMs to have good performance.
Memory Cards
And some video specialist cards (video in/out and channel managers/mixers).
Cards generally cost between 25-50K _each_ And with a decent setup you could have 250K of just cards :)
The SGI guys I dealt with here in Aus, were generally useless - they sold us very shit RM's and GU's and basically had a machine that was very poor in 3D performance for the machines abilities.
Once we replaced the RMs and received some great assistance from the US tech support, we were rocking. It was my first ever development in shaders (I wrote some rain, and snow shaders for the train sim) and posted solutions for particle rendering on Performer. Good times. Fond memories. Thanks for the video - its a very clean/nice example of a great machine.
Btw. Their memory and processor system actually became the industry standard, and is still used by Intel and AMD today :) .. The crossbar system was crazy, and awesome :)
How far ahead of consumer machines were these things? Assuming that the architecture was compatible, would you be able to run something with similar graphical fidelity to half life 2, from 2004, on it? The demos obviously aren't stretching the capabilities of the hardware, so I'm really curious what $250k would get you in 1993.
Do you still working on CGI today?
You didn't watch the video did you?
@@freddyli5356 yes still working with simulators in defence and AR and VR systems as well. Its been around 25years of electronics, PLC programming, games programming and simulation architecture. Some awesome experiences especially with SGI and the Onyx's bigger brother the Origin 3000 series. Good times :)
David Lannan yet you weren’t even born when this came out kid hahah
The paper is a non-conductive barrier to prevent an accidental misalignment of a card, a component outside of spec, or conductive dust from contacting and shorting the card to the metal case. It's basically because the specs for the cards allow for components to possibly go all the way to the edge, and well, adding more to the case is way more then expensive then a sheet of "fish paper".
These and the bigger cabinet systems were pretty fun to play with and work on back in the 90's they powered a lot early VR research tools. And although annoying the keyboard design wasn't a big issue as most of the time you ran them headless, and just used the serial port to do base of tasks until networking was up.
Good to see new blood with so much enthusiasm towards really geeky stuff. Thanks for finally bringing me up to speed on Silicon graphics, three decades after we used it as a milestone in computing in our vocabulary as little geeks.
Milestone then . . . Millstone now!
That's a Desk Side Onyx, they only came with 2-4 cpus. Full size Onyx looked like a refrigerator and had up to 24 cpus. I worked on both of these, including the Crimson when I was an intern at a VFX studio in 1995. Later that year, we beta-tested SoftImage 3D (owned by Microsoft at that point) which had just been released a Windows NT version. The PC of choice was from a company called Intergraph which had one of the most powerful graphics cards available for Windows NT at the time.
Side by side render speed comparison, the Intergraph machine was MUCH faster than the Crimson we had in the studio.
This was the beginning of the end for SGI, they never took the PC threat seriously and ended up coming to the PC market several years later with an expensive, unreliable workstation which I ended up using at another studio for a time. Within 10 years, SGIs disappeared from all the studios except for use with Flame, Inferno and Smoke. Which are high end compositing and VFX applications that relied on the SGIs hardware and super fast throughput. Eventually, they too migrated away from the SGIs and now run on souped up PC workstations instead.
This is indeed how the story went. We had a lot of Indy's , Challenges and later O2s in the office. I used to work for the european distributor of SGI so I got my hands on lots of thoses machines. Even had one at home. I used Newtek's Lightwave on it to try go get into 3D modelling.
I have no SGIs but I do regret selling my Indy. Never got into 3D professionally. But I am doing some modelling using Blender though on a Macbook Pro. It sucks at rendering though. Cool that you still own all those machines. I don't think my wife would have these lingering in the house ;-)
@@marander512 I started on the Amiga, first Imagine 3d, then Lightwave 1.0. I didn't even know they made an Irix version of Lightwave. Such an odd platform to port to at that time.
Also, SGI proprietry hardware doesn't help either. Where as you can run out to buy a generic mouse for the intergraph, you need to get back to the dealer to buy a simple mouse. Poweranimator was also the software of choice for these machines. Amazing that a Nvidia GTX now has more computing power on a PCIe bus than this behemoth. I was starting out with 3d and back then, 3dstudio ver 4 on ms dos was the main option for smaller studios.
Ah this brings back memories. I used to work at an oil company with a full size Onyx. It was used to load seismic data which was then projected onto a 180 degree screen. The geologists would manipulate the huge chunks of data to look for oil. At lunch, though, we would play Doom.
On the thumbnail: Oh, it’s just a little box.
0:11 : Awe sheeet!
I thought it was something like a Gamecube.... until the guy walked on with it! 😂
Darren Pearsall exactly 😂😂😂
It has more ram than my computer, and the graphics aren't the worst I've seen.
I'm a 40's architectural illustrator and i remember those really well, nobody could afford them unless you work for universal studios. lol. my humble setups were voodoo video cards from 3dfx Interactive, later Nvidia, running 3dmax from kinetics later Autodesk, nice video.
Yep, in the late 80's, early 90's I had a $5,000usd fully tricked out custom PC with an Orchid video card, 16MB DIMM ram, 1GB hard drive one of those full height 5.25' monstrosities which cost $2,500usd basically half price of the entire pc. Just imagine what would $5K buy you today ;) Nowadays we have 64GB to 256GB SDCards on smartphones in our pockets... talk about tech advancements.
How are you still alive?
soft drugs and beer wont kill you until you are in the 90's, long time to go yet.
My office had at least two onyx's that I remember, I used to use an O2 for my work and there were several indigos(?) and SunSparcs around too. The maintenance contracts for these things were 10s of thousands of dollars every year as well.
did own one. i restored her and sold her, plus, every time that i took it for a ride, park and walk away from it, when i was back, 10 guys taking selfies lying on top of the hood or begging for a ride. i have really bad social skills, you know....
@Dodoid are you going to continue making awesome videos? I just found this one and I really liked it.
Couple of extra points worth noting:
- The rack system supports up to three gfx pipes (adding a 3rd requires an additional card cage and 3-phase power), for a total of up to 18 output channels.
- The Challenge server model, not having gfx, could support more CPUs, up to 36. The Onyx/Challenge racks I bought both had 24x R10K/195MHz (2MB).
- Performance of RE2 depends very much on the number of RMs installed, as do various features such as available pixel depths and video formats. Dodoid's system appears to have up to 2 RM4s, the range being 1, 2 or 4 per pipe, using either RM4 boards (4MB texture memory) or RM5s (16MB TRAM). The TRAM does not combine between RMs, whereas the VRAM does, which is 40MB per board.
- The default SCSI disks are HVD (High Voltage Differential, 20MB/sec), though the buses can be altered to run SE at 10MB/sec. Be very careful when working with such systems not to connect the wrong type of disk, or to the wrong connector.
Yeah, that's the oldest computer that I have ever seen that can hold up till today with 16GB of RAM.
@@SimonWoodburyForget gaming....
@@SimonWoodburyForget no. Gaming on a computer. Are you dense? Just because you don't need 16 gigs, doesn't mean no one else does
@@SimonWoodburyForget There are plenty of games that are CPU dependent that will hiccup if you use less than 8gb of ram.
Doubt its super slow ram...
Nice electric radiator for cold winter days.
Adequate settings. I used to work on SGI workstation back in the days when 3D animation was = to Softimage and the Onyx was always set alone in a large room where 'the expensive stuff no one had the right to touch' used to stand.
It's funny to see a kid (no offence) playing around with that very same stuff a few years later.
I still have a piece of SGI harware though : the screwdriver they used to pack with the Indy's optional extension board. Very handy screwdriver. Still usefull as day one when the rest of the hardware is now just crap.
That's not a great deal of time.
Joaquín Nuñez That's kind of rude! 😉
do you happen to know if theres a dump online for the graphics library? i was interested in having the textures myself but i cant seem to find them anywhere
A couple years before this when I saw the first 1GB HDD for sale in Computer Shopper, they were about $1K each, to put the price point in perspective.
lol, I saw the first 1TB HD for sale I think it was back in 2005 and it they sold it for 1000 euro. Now you'll get a 4TB HDD for like 100 euro.
@@padmad3k63 I wonder if we will ever get to a point where we just don't need more and more space. Maybe in the future, hardly anybody will use local storage, and everyone will keep their files in the cloud, aside from maybe stuff like any embarrassing porn that you wouldn't want leaked. If we ever have affordable terabit speed internet, maybe processing will all move to the cloud as well. At home we'll have nothing but a dummy terminal. Tablets will be cheap bc the real hardware is in the cloud so you have a monthly payment to use it, bundled with a home pc, game console etc for discounts. Then you will no longer need to keep upgrading hardware at home. You pay for a higher tier package to get the better graphics in games, more storage, faster tablet, etc.
@KillerHax I didn't say anything about 12TB drives but about 4TB drives.
I bought one of those HD's. I was thinking it was a Seagate SCSI Barracuda, but on second thought, it may have been a WD Caviar drive. Too long ago to remember. I spent about $5000 on a computer for graphics rendering work (which was more than I earned working all summer long while in college!). If I recall correctly, RAM was running about $35 per MB at that time, so it was insanely expensive as well. Most computers only had a few MB in them.
pretty common. there used to be a 1MB / Dollar Deal at the local hardware store
Excellent job explaining this machine. I wish all UA-camrs were as good at getting to the point as this guy is.
Had no idea Doug Demuro reviewed computers too
I really enjoyed the quirks and features of this machine.
Christian Mcmillan haha I wish i didn’t get that or think it was funny
no one knows me :(
But he doesnt look like Doug to me
Better than hoovie
Wow..a blast from past! I designed one of the ASICs in this system - incredible to see one after all these years!
whoa, 1280x1024 resolution in 1993? 640x400 was considered excellent at that time. The first PC game I knew of that had 800x600 graphics was the Diablo 2 expansion, which came out in 2001.
f-16 mrf and the first f-22 lightning 2 from Novalogic had a 1024x768 resolution in 1995 f16 game came after.
I still play games with 800x600
Sim City 2, 1994 had 800x600 VESA support.
Actually I have to correct myself, SimCity 2000 came out in 1993 and indeed supported 800x600. Of course, 1280x1024 as a standard resolution in 1993 is still massively cool for a workstation.
The Atari TT 030 had a similar high resolution monitor and graphics output in 1990.
18:12 when pluto was still a planet. RIP
it is still a planet
@@clashwithbat2283 It's a dwarf planet, which by definition is not the same as planet.
It is a planet right now
@@symphony137 no. It was brought back into the cathegory of planets
Fuck space. Waste of time
That serial port on the backplane goes round to the bottom front, you can use it to 'terminal login' if there is a problem during boot leading to the screen not working. You could use the 'terminal' application that came with Windows and an actual serial Rs-232 cable rather than a 422 cable (harder to come by, then) to login, much like how you might 'ssh' into a machine today.
Back in the day these machines came with a £40K support contract, with lots of special stickers over door panels so that the SGI engineer would know if you had been in there. Hence you would never see the internals unless you had an SGI guy in upgrading a board for you.
Service was actually pretty good and you could get same day repairs, obviously on site. All Onyxs were 'clustered', e.g. for film and TV in the UK that meant Soho, London. So it was relatively easy for SGI to do support because their machines would only end up in small geographical locations.
So, thanks for the vid, back in the day there were production demands plus support contracts that meant that nobody could spend all day taking these boxes apart in their parent's bedrooms!
I 'had' an Infinite Reality 2 version with all of the boxes to allow for digital video out. Before that I had a Crimson, which was a very large box for one CPU. I also had a few O2s on my desk with an Indy tucked away in the mix too, however, the cost of all of this hardware was dwarfed by the cost of the broadcast kit that everything was linked up to. Clients paid £10K a day so 'my' Onyx did bring in millions.
Wow. Very well done, both content and production. We had a similar one to this unit when I worked at Global Village in Mountain View in '93-'95 -- though my memory is that it had a more "art deco" purple front -- so probably not a $250K unit. Still, I remember playing with some of the demos you showed. (As for me, I was writing Motorola CISC code for an office communications server product on Sun SPARC workstations. Ugh!)
I was always amused by SGI's system designs. Very colorful for the time when everything else was mainly beige or black.
Not only the hardware, even the OS came with unusual font style, a really cool theming of the elsewhere always default grayish and ugly Motif widget set!!
A few years ago my daughter saw their mouse pad and found it cool and nice to use 'not so standard' she said - true words.
It was always an honor to work with SGI computers for that!
the T-Rex from Jurassic Park loves this video
Was thinking the same.
Arcadio? eres tú xD?
Fernando? XD
That´s where the T-Rex was made! IoI
Makes sense since SGI machines assisted with the VFX of that movie.
(you can see a Crimson in the movie itself!)
But can it mine bitcoin?
of course it can until the late 00's. it has Asic chips on it.
Bicoin is dead, whoever mines these days make little to anything... have you not seen the massive drop on the stock? xD
dumbass doesnt know what hes talking about^
The fact you called it a stock proves you don't know anything about Crypto Currency lmao
Stock...
Those graphics are insanely impressive for 1993
But can it run crysis?
Hmm, very interesting to ponder what might be possible with a deskside IR system with a highly optimised engine, but it would need to be a complete rewrite to match the hw, no kind of port would be any good. IR can certainly run Quake2 and Quake3 pretty well, so who knows with decent coding. Huge differences though in what functions are support which would mean a lot of the visual effects in Crysis would have to be left behind, eg. SGI's gfx tech doesn't have pixel shaders, that hadn't been invented yet. Some of its staff moved to NVIDIA, took the IR base concept with them, removed all the stuff not needed for games, squased it onto a single board on a modern process size, voila the GF256 was born, the first PC GPU with a hw GE (it has the same GLperf specs as IR). SGI did argue internally at least once about making gaming consumer GPUs, but it didn't go anywhere, likely the resellers didn't want to have to deal with ordinary cheapo consumers and SGI bowed to that. Pity really as in theory a scalable product based on the RCP from the N64 would have been viable, but the whole Nintendo deal kinda soured as SGI failed to make much money once the console price went down, perhaps not realising that the real money in console gaming comes from the games sales, not the initial console sales.
Still, who knows, one could probably make something pretty cool, given how impressive some of the real-life apps and demos are for IR, but Crysis per se, no, that's just way too demanding. :D Love that game btw, still playing Warhead atm.
RE2 though, definitely not, it's just too old, even with RM5s. The GE speed and fill rate just aren't there for anything seriously detailed. Remember it's not just about triangles/sec either, eg. gaming hw has 3D functions such as 2-sided textures which pro hw doesn't need, all sorts of optimisations on one side or the other.
Ian.
+Kolja Wilms:
Nope.
Back in 1993, OpenGL was brand new. I think it was designed in 1992 or 1991 and it was competing with about 15 other 3D APIs. The great thing about OpenGL was that the specification was open. You can even downloading it today for the latest and greatest GL 4.5 (www.opengl.org).
This thing probably supports GL 1.1. There is no support for multitexturing. No vertex or fragment shaders. I imagine it can do hardware stencil buffer while most consumer gfx boards from 1995 to 2000 could not.
I think GL 1.2 came out in ~1998.
Shader support in the form of extensions came along after 2003 I think.
+James Fondren The only problem with that theory is that SGI created OpenGL
maybe with a resolution of 2x3 pixels
it will be a crisis when you try to.
It's a UNIX system... I know this!
Alan: *The door locks! Ellie boot up the door locks!*
Michael Hansen Im going to check this out now
You got the like!!! Jajaja
I've seen indigo running same OS
Clever girl.
You see how warped that board was? Imagine that board being on the very end of the row, close to the side. The pink paper could have saved you a 2nd mortgage.
great post
Having used this machine along with O2s in the 90s to render stuff, it is literally mindblowing that a run of the mill integrated graphics chip is about 1000x as powerful. I remember the SGI reps going around my college trying to sell more of them. The software license for Alias which was the precursor of Maya could run up to 30grand. I remember pricing an Onyx II maxed out in 96 and getting back 780k quote. Then a few years later it all went bust when you could run Maya on Windows for under 10k with better performance thanks to the advent of faster graphics cards. RIP SGI we all wanted one but now looking back, it was just a vanity thing unless you were rendering Jurassic Park or Toy Story as a business.
Yes, I remember them too, they were using them for 3D protein modeling, not sure it was the exact same machine though, in my unit they had a dedicated air conditioned computer room with huge Silicon Graphics workstations.
@@Scalpaxos nice!
*Clickable TIMESTAMPS:*
0:00 - 2:01 Musical Introduction Segment
2:02 - 3:10 Spoken Introduction
3:11 - 5:16 Onyx Background Information
5:17 - 11:11 Physical Overview
11:12 - 17:13 Teardown and Hardware
17:14 - 19:27 Software, Demos, and Games
19:28 - 21:38 Spoken Outro
21:39 - 21:52 Standard Dodoid Outro
Thanks
No longer need this comment timestamps in description work now
Juan Vivían your UA-cam isn’t updated to current version then
Young man, this video is on spot. Easy too follow, very well explained, and very educative. I really hope to see more of your content. Congrats.
What an amazingly well done video this was. 16Gb of RAM of 1993 unfathomable.
I still don't have that much on my 4 year old PC.
I wonder if SGI had "kidneys" as an official payment method back then ;)
If they could do that in 1993, imagine what we could do now for the same price in 2019. Now that’s something to think about.
Nasa pc
Engineering + time = money?
pixar... thats what we do in 2019
The boring answer is probably that you'd buy a decent enough workstation for < $10k and spend the rest on rendering servers. A rack full of high-spec x86-64 servers isn't as _cool_, but it's a lot of computing power.
First PC that i've ever seen that has more RAM than HDD
It could take MUCH more in terms of hard drives, mine is pretty "average Onyx" storage-wise. I read an SGI document a few months ago that was talking about setting up a server for a 300GB database on the Challenge XL (effectively the same thing as an Onyx rack, minus the graphics hardware).
Idk, maybe original IBM PC? It has 64k of RAM and no HDD(0B)
I remember my friends and I being amazed at these things back in college in the mid 90s. The things they were claiming with these bordered on witchcraft at that time. So glad people like you are keeping the spirit of SGI alive.
15:45 That paper is placed there so that you can sketch out your graphics ideas before entering them into the computer :)
Nice presentation on the inner workings of an SGI Onyx, a juggernaut of a machine. In the 90s I learned scripting and 3D modeling/animation while a few Onyxes were in the server room at school. SGIs machines were also in each classroom. Scripting brought out the machine's hidden power. That's one reason why Terminator 2 looks as good as it does. SGI made true dream machines.
Again, nice work on the video, and thanks for showing the inside. Now I know why SGI computers cost so much.
I believe the riveted paper is to prevent electrical arcing between the case and board.
I was guessing it was moisture activated for warranty purposes. But, your guess makes sense too.
Just getting ready to buy a Onyx. Been working with SGI computers since 1995. This will be my first big iron (heavy} computer lol.
You may find this guide useful in getting started:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/chalonyxdiag/
Want a maxed out R10K IR rack?
I would like to buy one too please. Where can I get?
Google is Evil, alas I'm out of space, already have four Onyx systems, two Onyx2s, an Onyx3800 and three Crimsons. :D I could buy the parts, but not if it's outside Europe, not worth the shipping & fees. Best place to advertise it would be forums.irix.cc.
Kandi Klover, finding one for sale is luck of the draw. Keep an eye on ebay, contact local hardware brokers and ask them to call you if they get anything that says "Silicon Graphics" on it, post a WTD advert to the above forum.
You can have mine if you come to NM.
The only thing more fun than working on an SGI was getting to make blockbuster Hollywood movies on it. Which I did.:)
That paper keeps you from accidentally shorting anything out.
I wonder if they used on onyx supergraphics computer to make the models for Lost in Space that 90s film that advertised silicon graphics pretty directly
They did indeed, and I think the name drop in the movie was part of the deal to help the production, but it is without doubt one of the cringiest company plugs ever, really wish they hadn't done that. I remember sinking into my seat in the cinema, though of course nobody else in the audience got the reference.
don't worry, that pc is big enough for him to move into if need be.