That brings back memories. Especially the time when I was having a problem with the HDD that prevented it from booting. I called the support line and the guy asked me to remove the disk and bang it on the desk! I did that, and he said "No - try again. I want to HEAR you bang the disk on the desk"! So I did as I was told (putting a dent in the desk), reinstalled the disk into the machine and I'll be damned - the system started up just fine! They did send a replacement disk as it was a known fault with a batch of IBM branded HDDs at the time.
im going to guess stiction or rubber isolators were making trouble earlier than usual, though it could also have been something wiht solder joints or contacts somewhere in the circuit
The long bar is for physical tampering prevention. The hole at the end is for a padlock. All of the workstations in the 1990's had some kind of physical security like that.
Some docs call it the "lock bar" because the hole at the rear can be chained down to the desk for lab situations.. so a thief not only steals a 50k workstation but also it comes with a free table! Win win..
@@lemagreengreen yeah but that RAM couldn't be used in anything else that I knew of - it was special, like a lot of UNIX hardware RAM, back in the day. Even today, even though modern UNIX systems use standard RAM, theirs is buffered ECC with specific CAS timings, high end, rare, hard to find, and expensive compared to desktop PC bucket RAM.
I remember seeing an SGI machine in action when I was university and I was stunned to see it rotating a teapot in real time. At the time I was doing a 3rd year project to render phong & gouraud shaded scenes on a Mac II and every frame took 3s to render.
In the early 2000's when I was in high school these were cheap I bought a lot of them, I had multiple Indy's, O2's, Octanes and Indigo 2's (purple and teal) and I currently have two kinda working Origin 2000 racks in my basement. Haven't booted them in years though.
In graduate school I worked as the computer support person for the math department. We had one of these but the real star(s) were the Next Step machines(Steve Jobs when he left Apple for a while). We had room full of them and there was nothing else like them. I had learned UNIX on the Spark but NEXT was so far ahead of everyone at the time. When that lab was closed in the early 2000s the professor that was in charge of getting rid of the machines gave me two of them. I ran them occasionally but ended up throwing them away during covid. You should try building a NEXT STEP machine - get a "pizza box" not a "cube" if you do it,
That demo of you browsing the web, even a simplified version, on a mid-90s machine is what blew my mind the most. Even moving windows around would lag like hell on a lot of contemporary computers. I think back to my single core Pentium 3 box from around 1999, and it was never that smooth doing....well, anything, really.
I browsed the early web on my Amiga 3000 in 1998 (25Mhz Motorola 68030). It wasn't snappy but for simple sites it still worked! That was also the year I finally got my first Windows PC :)
Yeah, Ikr, I remember vividly going online for the first time, around 1999 as well, I think that was Pentium 3 too, with 32 MB of RAM and a 10 GB HDD, even had a DVD drive installed, it was our only DVD player until I got the Xbox. Surfing the web was horribly slow on that thing too, took several minutes just to load a web portal. I remember Delta Force was about as demanding of a game as you could expect to play on it. Played mostly Diablo though.
A P3 box running Win98SE with a decent amount of RAM could get pretty snappy (certainly should've moved a window around as fast as the one shown here). Really the lag online back then was due to the nascent internet infrastructure and dial-up connections. Even if you had a T3 connection at work or whatever, and a fast computer, you were waiting a long time for webpages to load. We take what we have today for granted, but it took a long time to get here.
Yes, I can imagine browsing the InterNet back in the day, because I was there, and the IMPACT Indigo2 R10000 was my daily driver - my desktop. I upgraded it to 256 MB of RAM, a 9 GB IBM UltraStar drive, an hp ScanJet IIc SCSI scanner (which I still have), and brand spanking new, external 6x SCSI CDRW Plextor drive. I still have that IRIX 6.5.22 drive on the sled.
I came here to say the same thing - I first experienced surfing the web with Mosaic on my mom's Indigo2 in her office at work, as a teenager. A year later, she was able to bring home an old Indigo as a WFH setup and that would be my daily driver web browser until I moved out to college in '97.
@@matt-irby I managed to pick up a complete Indigo about 20 years ago (free!) and was surprised to find it while trying out all of the installed software.
Years ago I made a video on consolidating all the IRIX media onto a hard drive and install from a hard disk. I'm glad someone figured out the network boot method. Well done!
I have an SGI O2 which, after getting fixed up, has been a blast to use. The original hard drive actually works still, but I managed to get it booting off of a RaSCSI! I read some accounts online where they suggested it wouldn't perform as well, but for an RPi 4, it's actually faster than the drive that shipped with the thing. But with that, the optical drive that's still broken doesn't matter! I was able to use a USB DVD drive to install IRIX from the original discs, and I'm using the Pi as a proxy connected over Ethernet, so it's effectively wifi-enabled! And I'll have you know, FrogFind is the first thing I pulled up!
Finally SGIs on this channel! Please continue upgrading your indigo2, I had a Fuel 800Mhz 3 years ago, I had to sell it, I would love to have it again with all this modernizations! (Sdcard, reanimator, memory) Thank man!
I remember these computers back in college, as something unattainable, that a big Uni would have like 3 or 4 in a certain very specific computing lab. And now they're pretty much garbo, relics from the past. Totally fascinating.
Collectors keep the values high though and there's basically none being found from the old sources (university storerooms, game studios) any more :( Early 00s were good time to collect SGI machines, they were often free if you were able to move them.
Awesome! I don't have to imagine browsing the internet on an SGI machine. I had the fortune of attending a university that hosted several SGI Indys and Indigos (first gen). I hope you have a lot of fun with them.
For the cost of that COLLECTION you could buy a MANSION in the 1990s. The $50k spent on that Indigo 2 alone would easily have bought a modest house... my parents' home cost $67k in 1998.
awesome! I got to play around with one of these at the Danish public broadcasting corporation (DR.DK) graphics department, around 1993. When the graphics people weren't around, the technicians would play the networked flight simulator, together with the older SGI Iris they also had. Graphics folks would use Softimage to do 3d graphics and animations for TV. Coming from MacOS8, it was great to see that even when the SGI would throw a graphics flip and show only garbage on screen, a press on the big purple button on the front, under the cover, would magically open up a dialogue window asking if one wanted to shut down. No chance os MacOS8 having been recoverable at such points.
Mac OS didn’t have protected memory until OS X came around, which was Unix based. I recently got a PowerBook G3 Pismo which originally came with 64MB of RAM and came to me with 192. Even with the RAM upgrade, it wouldn’t be able to handle 1 Classilla browser window in its original Mac OS 9 without freezing and needing a restart! Lucky thing has 1GB now and will for the rest of its long life.
I was an early artist / UI / UE / developer for SOFTIMAGE (1989-95) .. was an amazing tool that I miss. not sure there would be much software around that would leverage the power of that thing now. the internet certainly wasn’t the reason to use one. some of our developers went to work for pixar before I left. the power (at the time) for graphics was the geometry engines (for drawing wireframe lines). or to add capture cards for output / import from professional video gear. television production not sure what a regular person would do with an SGI .. without any of the high end software systems for it. amazing there are current options to interface with SCSI. in 1990 .. all the decent stuff was 120,000.00 USD for a license that only spanned a year. the 50K system. was. kinda useless w/o software, and .. every year. what you bought was pretty obsolete.
@DeviatingVapors wauw! What an amazing career! You've probably seen quite a few fundamental developments in your time. Yeah, Macs at that turn could also cost over 10,000 dollars a piece, and Mac dealers were the equivalent of Jaguar dealers who'd drop several k price estimates like it was a few dimes. SGI things were of course a few magnitudes more expensive, bit, well, those were the early days. Crazy the amount of money the stuff cost. Nowadays I guess video hardware - including cameras - still has those price points. Thanks for your anecdotes in any event!
@@miskaknapek so much was developed - yet never left each lab. all that. was short lived. very unique ideas. a handful of genius coders. were happening in tiny boutique studios. developing tools. for in-house ideas. our system wasn’t designed (back then) to be .. sold. to others. but. to have a tool [have longevity] .. there needed to be some way to fund the staff. innovate. remain relevant. extra staff. split development efforts. obsolete .. in terms of being fiscally competitive. but. not obsolete with what could be accomplished back then on your own dime (to have creative software on a very capable system .. was such a joy). when I retire. I hope I can convince a couple other developers to revive the early system ideas on current hardware. my life started out with pens. paper. ink. oil. before computer. and we set out to do a technical drawing program. before illustrator or photoshop ever existed. we had more... and helped contribute to being a better crayon box, so ideas could be put forth. in nearly any of the mediums of the day / definitely an exciting time to contribute.
Only briefly had my hands on some SGI kit back in the day, but did visit their UK HQ … they had some examples of their stuff in the reception area - the CPU from a Cray, some SGI workstations and a Nintendo 64 (I think)… a somewhat eclectic mix of products 😊
7:57 Can we just appreciate the fun "confetti" look to the plastic there? Nowadays everything is a soulless glass or aluminum slab and if you're lucky Google or Apple will give you like three colors for your newest slab.... I remember how the 80's, 90's, and a bit of the 00's had so many different and daring designs. Why can't we do that today?
Yes and no. The vast majority of computers sold in the 80s and 90s were beige boxes. Wasn't until late 90s you started see things like those colored clear Macs. All lucthen appliances were white or beige etc. For the most part the weird and funky stuff is what's survived and what's talked about now. Plus most of those funky colored designs were the high end expensive stuff that most people didn't own.
I hypothesize it partially comes down to why Mac OS X lost its skeuomorphic design. Computers were a new concept back then, and design was just as important as performance and innovation. This and the iMac G3 were among the first to buck the beige box trend, but we’re back here in bland land again after a 15 year period of wild and wacky designs being the trend. The hunt for a G4 Cube continues…
Great video! This *ALMOST* inspired me to pull out my old Indy from the garage and bring it back to life, but laziness and the lack of a replacement for the long-dead Dallas chip won out today. It did make me hit that subscribe button, so that's still a win.
I remember stacks of these and Indigo2s showing up at computer shows around 2000. Despite the high price tags they were worthless in a few years. Getting one running at the time was nothing but pain and suffering though. They needed non-standard keyboards and mice, special expensive memory, high end SCSI drives, and a SCSI floptical drive. Needing a SGI pinout 13W3 monitor adapter was further pain and good luck finding a copy of IRIX. Your machine might have a special piece of hardware in it. Some of the OEM SGI DDS tape drives have firmware to dump/record DAT audio tapes.
I think it would be somewhat appropriate to try to build the Super Mario 64 PC port or other Nintendo 64 games for IRIX, considering the console's development history
My ex boss had a pack of four 256MB Dimms from something like this, a bit mind blowing in 97 ish. When people with X86 PCs were doing with 4/8/16MB at the time. P1s with 100Mhz and a bit clocks
As far as I know these machines used unique DAT drives that could read\write data AND music. That kind of drive is very valuable in DAT enthusiasts community as it allows to read/write music directly to/from PC, and with greater speed than any DAT deck. Maybe you should look into it.
I know this thing. At the TV station i worked for it was the "game producer" for the phone in games. We had a program those days that was called "the weakest link" and the station i worked, it was the weakest link. Either it got stuck or didn't executed any commands. We put a sticker on it with "the weakest link" on it. We took it off when some people who sold it, came to check on it 😂
some serious irony here. yesterday i was looking at a lot of different SGI workstations on youtube and ebay. i even found out that LTT has a video on an Indigo 2 EXTREME. but suddenly, out of the blue, Action Retro releases a video on one too? that's just weird... but I LOVE IT.
I hate to encourage truly dangerous stunts, but I would love to see that grotty case fully cleaned up (I know the brittle plastic makes this risky). The outside looks like Ray Arnold has been chain smoking next to it for an entire software development cycle, but the beautiful "wine grape purple" inside the door is just gorgeous.
This sort of stuff is exactly why I subscribe :D Back in my early DEC Alpha days I did come across IRIX from time to time, but I didn't know how to drive it because it was SystemV derived and DEC OSF/1 then was BSD 4.4. DEC transitioned to Tru64 which WAS SystemV (plus Mach plus the others etc) and suddenly I had extra strings to my bow. Happy days.
Fun. I worked on ALL the 90’s workstations, to ensure the WNDX Cross Platform GUI Toolkit worked. SGI even loaned us an Indigo for about 6 months to do the port.
Wow brings back memories... I remember my college having some indy and indigo workstations in the lab, and origin 2000 servers. Spent a decent amount of time using Irix back in the day.
Back in the mid 90s we had a huge amount of sgi workstations and servers, lots of indigo’s and indigo2’s and origin2000, they all got swapped out for windows nt pc’s in the early 2000’s
Well.. you got to have 128MB sticks, and those was rare to non existing.. well at least at launch, you probably could get them the year after. And i would not call it the mid 90s. the 195Mhz R10 000 version of Indigo 2 was introduced in 1997, i would call that late 90s. Bu that time the 300Mhz Pentium 2 was that as far as i could find could at least in theory support 2GB of ram. It was also by this point Intel start surpassing MIps in performance. When the first Indigo 2 was introduced it was about 4 times more powerful than the fastest Intel based PC, by 1997 it was basically a wash.
Back in the 90s, I was working at a database company. At that time, there were many different UNIX flavors, and I was the lead engineer responsible for porting to one of those flavors from Solaris, our development platform. Our SGI porting team had received new SGI workstations, which, compared to my Sun workstation, were very sleek and even had webcams. I really wanted one of those as my workstation, but I wasn’t working on porting to the SGI operating system.
I had an Octane 2 a few years ago. I got rid of it last year because I moved and it was heavy. I tried to find it a home with a UA-camr or something, but nobody was interested in one that wasn't already fully functional. Thankfully, a friend of mine -- the one who I had given the other one I picked up at the same time -- wanted it.
I got an Octane from a hospital where it ran their MRI. I had to pull a scsi cdrom from my powermac 8500 and wipe the machine to a fresh install of IRIX. You missed the fun of doing that with 25 cd roms and crossing fingers to get it done. To my surprise it worked! I still have my octane and even upped the weird ram so I play with it on occasion. Doom plays well, and I got an iris version of Basilisk so I have Mac OS 7 running in emulation. It’s such a beast and I love the damn thing!
Back in 2002, I had one of these, plus a lot of other SGI models. Makes me sad that I gave them all away in 2005 or i'd be minted by now, either from making UA-cam content about my collections or just selling them off as they were maxed out with specs. These are far too expensive to re-buy now. I got mine for £200 or less, as back then, a lot of people were getting rid of them as scrap. :(
The older BlueScsi work as I recall, but are slower than period correct SGI machines. My hope is the newer Raspberry Pi chips can help make the speed tolerable.
In the 90's I operated an Indigo machine as a server for a high tech printer one of the things I found on there was flight simulator software and many jets would meet a firey death as I never quite figured out how to land.
What a memory... not used one since I was at Uni in the late 1900s as the two student flatbed scanners were attached to a pair of these (otherwise we were all Sun workstations). And... upgrades! Can't wait 🙂
In 93 an Indy was my desktop and we use a Indy 2 with a rendering board (don't remember the specs) I just remember that machine was $100,000 system. We were using sofimage on both systems. Very cool to see these systems again. I do remember the Indy had 4 4gb drives on it and we keep running out of space
Courtesy of a very large research grant, I had one of these SGIs on my desk back in 1995. I did computer simulations and 3D graphics on it. I used it for 5 years.
Nice screwdriver! I've always been fascinated with the old Unix stations from the 90s too. I owned a couple of alphas for a while and would love to get hold of an SGI. I guess to eBay I go!
It's amazing to me how quickly SGI became obsolete. I had an internship in 2002 to learn Maya. I was using a Sony laptop, when another animator was using a $30K SGI tower that the organization had bought just a few years before. We decided to benchmark Maya on my PC laptop vs the SGI behemoth. My laptop was almost 2x as fast.
I have absolutely no professional or personal connection with these machines, but I'm still fascinated to see them. Darned right, I'll stick around. Especially if you end up cracking the case so we can get a gander at how SG designed the insides. Also, thanks to you, I now desperately want one of those gorgeous turquoise SG cases. Empty or otherwise. Dang it! ;)
aside from needing to get a scsi cdrom drive working on mine (and finding or buying a scsi hdd alternative), my giant purple boat anchor works fine. and thankfully, now that there's some good options, i'll get around to finally getting that sorted out. full set of irix discs, proper ungodly heavy monitor with 13w3. sigh. one of these days.
At my old job in the 90s we had a bunch of SGI machines. At the time I had AOL at home, which was not exactly the Internet. At work they had an Indigo connects to a T1 line and that was my first real experience on the World Wide Web. I’d write URLs down and try to access them via AOL… no dice!
SCSI2SD 5 is a terrible choice for the Indigo... It's way too slow. You need at least a V6 or AzulSCSI/BlueSCSIv2 to get anywhere near decent performance on that machine. Even they aren't adequate performance wise. By the way I'd recommend LOVE for installing, I've used various methods in the past and LOVE is absolutely amazing. You just run it on your PC and it acts as an install server. You're gonna need the T-RAM upgrades on that IMPACT card to make it viable for some gaming, ie; you'd need MAX IMPACT. Either that or use the o2 you showed earlier, it has unified texture memory (like AGP memory).
That's a beautiful monitor. It's worth pointing out how unusual having network install options built into the system firmware was in the 90s. It was really only found on high end workstations
We had SGI workstations (older models than this) in my CS Graphics classes at university. Those were my favorite classes, and I ogled over the specs of the Indigo systems when those were announced. Definitely couldn’t get one for personal use back then.
My university ran all of the College of Engineering hosts off of SGI mainframes, they had multiple refrigerator sized SGI computers. I am certain each one of those was wayyy more than $50k. I also remember SGI came in and had like a pop-up showroom demo for all of their available desktop workstations in, like, 1992, and I remember how amazing they all looked, and how expensive they all were. Of course the intention was to show them off to all the researchers who had grant money burning a hole in their pockets, but I was an undergrad at the time and it just seemed so unattainable at the time.
That is a pretty impressive stack of SGI machines you have there! I guess I now have to go back and see if you have done any content on that O2. It was basically my dream computer back in the day :)
That was a 1st gen SHO, by 96 they were on the 3rd gen SHO with the 3.4l Yamaha V8 and slipping cam pulleys. The auto only jellybean SHO that was barely distinguishable from the regular Taurus looks wise. You had to get the cam pulleys welded to the cams to keep them from slipping.
Can you do a video on "how to make a server from your old power Macintosh/iBook/Performa/PowerBook etc.. or a video on the Commodore Pet, restoration and upgrading? Thank you.
Used one of those SGIs in college for 3D animation and VR. Between those and the O2 workstations, the school had a main server or computer (may have been an Onyx) that everything was networked to. It was the size of a small fridge. Ah, the good ol' days.
This makes me miss my old original Iris Indigo with the Elan Graphics option. It was old when I got it, but it was still a great machine. I sometimes wish I had kept it.
I also have such a love of that era of unix workstations. It's just too bad that these days they're soo thin on the ground that they're disturbingly expensive. Plus I'm on the wrong side of the planet, so even if one does show up these days it's impossibly expensive shipping 😢 Guess I'm lucky that I did manage to get together a reasonable collection 20 years ago when they were around their price floor. But some of the later stuff I would've loved to find happened at an era that I had zero disposable funds (actually less than zero, it took 10 years to pay off the debt of just trying to survive those years)
That brings back memories. Especially the time when I was having a problem with the HDD that prevented it from booting. I called the support line and the guy asked me to remove the disk and bang it on the desk! I did that, and he said "No - try again. I want to HEAR you bang the disk on the desk"! So I did as I was told (putting a dent in the desk), reinstalled the disk into the machine and I'll be damned - the system started up just fine! They did send a replacement disk as it was a known fault with a batch of IBM branded HDDs at the time.
That's quite a hard solution for a hard drive problem 😅
The good ol’ technical tap 😂
That is too funny though!
im going to guess stiction or rubber isolators were making trouble earlier than usual, though it could also have been something wiht solder joints or contacts somewhere in the circuit
iirc a lot of people just straight up boot these things with networked drives because it's marginally faster/slightly easier
The long bar is for physical tampering prevention. The hole at the end is for a padlock. All of the workstations in the 1990's had some kind of physical security like that.
And very understandable given the price of RAM in the early-mid 90s, these workstations were stuffed with many thousands of dollars worth.
Some docs call it the "lock bar" because the hole at the rear can be chained down to the desk for lab situations.. so a thief not only steals a 50k workstation but also it comes with a free table! Win win..
@@lemagreengreen yeah but that RAM couldn't be used in anything else that I knew of - it was special, like a lot of UNIX hardware RAM, back in the day. Even today, even though modern UNIX systems use standard RAM, theirs is buffered ECC with specific CAS timings, high end, rare, hard to find, and expensive compared to desktop PC bucket RAM.
I remember seeing an SGI machine in action when I was university and I was stunned to see it rotating a teapot in real time. At the time I was doing a 3rd year project to render phong & gouraud shaded scenes on a Mac II and every frame took 3s to render.
In the early 2000's when I was in high school these were cheap I bought a lot of them, I had multiple Indy's, O2's, Octanes and Indigo 2's (purple and teal) and I currently have two kinda working Origin 2000 racks in my basement. Haven't booted them in years though.
In graduate school I worked as the computer support person for the math department. We had one of these but the real star(s) were the Next Step machines(Steve Jobs when he left Apple for a while). We had room full of them and there was nothing else like them. I had learned UNIX on the Spark but NEXT was so far ahead of everyone at the time. When that lab was closed in the early 2000s the professor that was in charge of getting rid of the machines gave me two of them. I ran them occasionally but ended up throwing them away during covid. You should try building a NEXT STEP machine - get a "pizza box" not a "cube" if you do it,
Saw SGI Indigo and clicked immediately. I LOVE the old 90s SGI computers. I want an old ONYX sooooo bad! I LOVED using Bryce 3D.
oh god bryce 3d was awesome! jesus core memory unlocked...used it for deisgning website stuff with flash
I liked the bit where he fixed the computer.
Oh yea bud
No spoilers!!
Mine was where he was dramatically waving his hands for no real reason.
It was okay I guess
@@greatquux Dont read the comments if you dont want to get spoiled lil bro
That demo of you browsing the web, even a simplified version, on a mid-90s machine is what blew my mind the most. Even moving windows around would lag like hell on a lot of contemporary computers. I think back to my single core Pentium 3 box from around 1999, and it was never that smooth doing....well, anything, really.
I browsed the early web on my Amiga 3000 in 1998 (25Mhz Motorola 68030). It wasn't snappy but for simple sites it still worked!
That was also the year I finally got my first Windows PC :)
Yeah, Ikr, I remember vividly going online for the first time, around 1999 as well, I think that was Pentium 3 too, with 32 MB of RAM and a 10 GB HDD, even had a DVD drive installed, it was our only DVD player until I got the Xbox.
Surfing the web was horribly slow on that thing too, took several minutes just to load a web portal. I remember Delta Force was about as demanding of a game as you could expect to play on it. Played mostly Diablo though.
A P3 box running Win98SE with a decent amount of RAM could get pretty snappy (certainly should've moved a window around as fast as the one shown here).
Really the lag online back then was due to the nascent internet infrastructure and dial-up connections. Even if you had a T3 connection at work or whatever, and a fast computer, you were waiting a long time for webpages to load. We take what we have today for granted, but it took a long time to get here.
Yes, I can imagine browsing the InterNet back in the day, because I was there, and the IMPACT Indigo2 R10000 was my daily driver - my desktop. I upgraded it to 256 MB of RAM, a 9 GB IBM UltraStar drive, an hp ScanJet IIc SCSI scanner (which I still have), and brand spanking new, external 6x SCSI CDRW Plextor drive. I still have that IRIX 6.5.22 drive on the sled.
also had a HP ScanJet IIc for a Mac Quadra 900. Excellent colours, and a great sound (funky box too :).
I hope it still works well :)
You bought one of these to use at home?
@@lemagreengreen at my end it was home office equipment as a company's graphic designer.
I came here to say the same thing - I first experienced surfing the web with Mosaic on my mom's Indigo2 in her office at work, as a teenager. A year later, she was able to bring home an old Indigo as a WFH setup and that would be my daily driver web browser until I moved out to college in '97.
I think my brain would have exploded, if I had seen a PC with 256 MB of RAM in 1996! A 9 GB HDD was pretty beefy, but not unheard of.
SGI AND ACTION RETRO?
Christmas was a few days ago, yet this feels more like christmas than christmas did!
It’s a UNIX system. I know this!
Note: She was surprised by the 3D representation of a UNIX filesystem. That was a real application on Irix.
@@pseudotasukiAnd surprisingly that wasn't some Hollywood-ism of computers. The 3D file finder was actually a real thing.
@@matt-irby I managed to pick up a complete Indigo about 20 years ago (free!) and was surprised to find it while trying out all of the installed software.
@@pseudotasukiwhere there any renders on it still?????? What was it used for?
@@djksfhakhaks Nah, they'd cleaned out the data. I think it was used for tree stand visualization. I worked at a forestry school.
“Steamed clams? Oh-ho-ho! I meant STEAMED HAMS!” 😂
Years ago I made a video on consolidating all the IRIX media onto a hard drive and install from a hard disk. I'm glad someone figured out the network boot method. Well done!
I have an SGI O2 which, after getting fixed up, has been a blast to use. The original hard drive actually works still, but I managed to get it booting off of a RaSCSI! I read some accounts online where they suggested it wouldn't perform as well, but for an RPi 4, it's actually faster than the drive that shipped with the thing.
But with that, the optical drive that's still broken doesn't matter! I was able to use a USB DVD drive to install IRIX from the original discs, and I'm using the Pi as a proxy connected over Ethernet, so it's effectively wifi-enabled! And I'll have you know, FrogFind is the first thing I pulled up!
SGI systems are so freaking cool
We had one of these at my first job. I loved working on that thing. Of course, being purple, the hostname was Barney 😂
😂😂😂
Finally SGIs on this channel! Please continue upgrading your indigo2, I had a Fuel 800Mhz 3 years ago, I had to sell it, I would love to have it again with all this modernizations! (Sdcard, reanimator, memory) Thank man!
Aww man, that reminds me of the old Macintosh Classic that I had to sell.
Broke my heart to let it go!
I remember these computers back in college, as something unattainable, that a big Uni would have like 3 or 4 in a certain very specific computing lab. And now they're pretty much garbo, relics from the past. Totally fascinating.
Collectors keep the values high though and there's basically none being found from the old sources (university storerooms, game studios) any more :(
Early 00s were good time to collect SGI machines, they were often free if you were able to move them.
I remember Harvard having a ton of these.
Awesome!
I don't have to imagine browsing the internet on an SGI machine. I had the fortune of attending a university that hosted several SGI Indys and Indigos (first gen).
I hope you have a lot of fun with them.
For the cost of that COLLECTION you could buy a MANSION in the 1990s. The $50k spent on that Indigo 2 alone would easily have bought a modest house... my parents' home cost $67k in 1998.
awesome!
I got to play around with one of these at the Danish public broadcasting corporation (DR.DK) graphics department, around 1993.
When the graphics people weren't around, the technicians would play the networked flight simulator, together with the older SGI Iris they also had.
Graphics folks would use Softimage to do 3d graphics and animations for TV.
Coming from MacOS8, it was great to see that even when the SGI would throw a graphics flip and show only garbage on screen, a press on the big purple button on the front, under the cover, would magically open up a dialogue window asking if one wanted to shut down. No chance os MacOS8 having been recoverable at such points.
Mac OS didn’t have protected memory until OS X came around, which was Unix based. I recently got a PowerBook G3 Pismo which originally came with 64MB of RAM and came to me with 192. Even with the RAM upgrade, it wouldn’t be able to handle 1 Classilla browser window in its original Mac OS 9 without freezing and needing a restart! Lucky thing has 1GB now and will for the rest of its long life.
I was an early artist / UI / UE / developer for SOFTIMAGE (1989-95) .. was an amazing tool that I miss.
not sure there would be much software around that would leverage the power of that thing now.
the internet certainly wasn’t the reason to use one.
some of our developers went to work for pixar before I left.
the power (at the time) for graphics was the geometry engines (for drawing wireframe lines).
or to add capture cards for output / import from professional video gear. television production
not sure what a regular person would do with an SGI .. without any of the high end software systems for it.
amazing there are current options to interface with SCSI.
in 1990 .. all the decent stuff was 120,000.00 USD for a license that only spanned a year.
the 50K system. was. kinda useless w/o software, and .. every year. what you bought was pretty obsolete.
@DeviatingVapors wauw! What an amazing career! You've probably seen quite a few fundamental developments in your time.
Yeah, Macs at that turn could also cost over 10,000 dollars a piece, and Mac dealers were the equivalent of Jaguar dealers who'd drop several k price estimates like it was a few dimes.
SGI things were of course a few magnitudes more expensive, bit, well, those were the early days. Crazy the amount of money the stuff cost.
Nowadays I guess video hardware - including cameras - still has those price points.
Thanks for your anecdotes in any event!
@@miskaknapek so much was developed - yet never left each lab. all that. was short lived. very unique ideas. a handful of genius coders. were happening in tiny boutique studios. developing tools. for in-house ideas.
our system wasn’t designed (back then) to be .. sold. to others. but. to have a tool [have longevity] .. there needed to be some way to fund the staff. innovate. remain relevant.
extra staff. split development efforts.
obsolete .. in terms of being fiscally competitive. but. not obsolete with what could be accomplished back then on your own dime (to have creative software on a very capable system .. was such a joy).
when I retire. I hope I can convince a couple other developers to revive the early system ideas on current hardware. my life started out with pens. paper. ink. oil. before computer.
and we set out to do a technical drawing program. before illustrator or photoshop ever existed. we had more...
and helped contribute to being a better crayon box, so ideas could be put forth.
in nearly any of the mediums of the day / definitely an exciting time to contribute.
Only briefly had my hands on some SGI kit back in the day, but did visit their UK HQ … they had some examples of their stuff in the reception area - the CPU from a Cray, some SGI workstations and a Nintendo 64 (I think)… a somewhat eclectic mix of products 😊
I may have to dig out my indigo2 now. The raspberry pi installer looks way easier than the older netinstall methods.
If you plan to use this thing for gaming, I hope you try the IRIX port of Classicube.
dread it, run from it, classicube will arrive all the same
7:57 Can we just appreciate the fun "confetti" look to the plastic there? Nowadays everything is a soulless glass or aluminum slab and if you're lucky Google or Apple will give you like three colors for your newest slab....
I remember how the 80's, 90's, and a bit of the 00's had so many different and daring designs. Why can't we do that today?
I mean, there was plenty of beige back then, which, today, I'm nostalgic for.
Yes and no. The vast majority of computers sold in the 80s and 90s were beige boxes. Wasn't until late 90s you started see things like those colored clear Macs. All lucthen appliances were white or beige etc.
For the most part the weird and funky stuff is what's survived and what's talked about now. Plus most of those funky colored designs were the high end expensive stuff that most people didn't own.
I hypothesize it partially comes down to why Mac OS X lost its skeuomorphic design. Computers were a new concept back then, and design was just as important as performance and innovation. This and the iMac G3 were among the first to buck the beige box trend, but we’re back here in bland land again after a 15 year period of wild and wacky designs being the trend.
The hunt for a G4 Cube continues…
New concept to the mass market/end users, sorry.
I'm content with dressing something up in a Gelaskin every so often. YMMV.
Great video! This *ALMOST* inspired me to pull out my old Indy from the garage and bring it back to life, but laziness and the lack of a replacement for the long-dead Dallas chip won out today. It did make me hit that subscribe button, so that's still a win.
Meaning the RTC chip? If so, there’s fairly simple ways to replace it, both NOS and brand new PCB options.
@@c1ph3rpunk Yeah, the RTC chip. I'm aware of both the NOS and PCB options, see previous "laziness" qualifier. :)
I remember stacks of these and Indigo2s showing up at computer shows around 2000. Despite the high price tags they were worthless in a few years. Getting one running at the time was nothing but pain and suffering though. They needed non-standard keyboards and mice, special expensive memory, high end SCSI drives, and a SCSI floptical drive. Needing a SGI pinout 13W3 monitor adapter was further pain and good luck finding a copy of IRIX.
Your machine might have a special piece of hardware in it. Some of the OEM SGI DDS tape drives have firmware to dump/record DAT audio tapes.
I think it would be somewhat appropriate to try to build the Super Mario 64 PC port or other Nintendo 64 games for IRIX, considering the console's development history
In a way, it would be less porting and more emulating what developing it was like
Can't do it if the specs of the computer is less than it was the N64 my friend
I believe they were using an SGI Iris Crimson, not an Indigo 2.
@@V01D_Protogen does it make a huge difference?
My ex boss had a pack of four 256MB Dimms from something like this, a bit mind blowing in 97 ish.
When people with X86 PCs were doing with 4/8/16MB at the time. P1s with 100Mhz and a bit clocks
As far as I know these machines used unique DAT drives that could read\write data AND music.
That kind of drive is very valuable in DAT enthusiasts community as it allows to read/write music directly to/from PC, and with greater speed than any DAT deck.
Maybe you should look into it.
I know this thing. At the TV station i worked for it was the "game producer" for the phone in games. We had a program those days that was called "the weakest link" and the station i worked, it was the weakest link. Either it got stuck or didn't executed any commands. We put a sticker on it with "the weakest link" on it. We took it off when some people who sold it, came to check on it 😂
Having lived in a mostly beige world, I always drooled over the SGI colours. Yes, I am easily amused.
I worked on SGI Irix machines in the late 90s, I was a contractor on an Air Force base.
Heh, running that thing off an SD card is horrifying.
I cringe a bit when I see someone use an SD card instead of an SSD for the OS, they wear out much faster…
some serious irony here. yesterday i was looking at a lot of different SGI workstations on youtube and ebay. i even found out that LTT has a video on an Indigo 2 EXTREME. but suddenly, out of the blue, Action Retro releases a video on one too? that's just weird... but I LOVE IT.
I hate to encourage truly dangerous stunts, but I would love to see that grotty case fully cleaned up (I know the brittle plastic makes this risky). The outside looks like Ray Arnold has been chain smoking next to it for an entire software development cycle, but the beautiful "wine grape purple" inside the door is just gorgeous.
It's yellowed as badly as any other ABS case from that era. I wonder if RetroBriting it would restore the color?
Silicon Graphics was also involved with the making of the Nintendo 64.
Well I’m from Utica, and we called it CGI when we used SGI
This sort of stuff is exactly why I subscribe :D Back in my early DEC Alpha days I did come across IRIX from time to time, but I didn't know how to drive it because it was SystemV derived and DEC OSF/1 then was BSD 4.4. DEC transitioned to Tru64 which WAS SystemV (plus Mach plus the others etc) and suddenly I had extra strings to my bow. Happy days.
Finally an SGI setup video by Action Retro!
This is really cool.
And with all them fans going so hard it should be!
I remember fawning over one of these at a design studio and after scoring an old Personal Iris 4D/20 in 1994 I was in love...
It's a UNIX System! I know this!
I don't see the white rabbit object...
came to the comments for this, was not disappointed.
Just have to find the right file ..
I love how people are referencing movies Autism friendly me and my girlfriend actually watched Jurassic Park together
@@JohnSmith-xq1pz That's cuz we hate that hacker crap.
you've encouraged me to start thinking about getting my indy running...kudos
Fun. I worked on ALL the 90’s workstations, to ensure the WNDX Cross Platform GUI Toolkit worked. SGI even loaned us an Indigo for about 6 months to do the port.
I was hoping you’d stick a dozen M4 minis into this and turn it into a squirrel simulator server emulator powerhouse. That said, good video 🤣
Wow brings back memories... I remember my college having some indy and indigo workstations in the lab, and origin 2000 servers. Spent a decent amount of time using Irix back in the day.
Back in the mid 90s we had a huge amount of sgi workstations and servers, lots of indigo’s and indigo2’s and origin2000, they all got swapped out for windows nt pc’s in the early 2000’s
we can blame Maya also running on Windows NT… unlike the other 3d software, that mostly only ran on SGI hardware :)
a mid 90s machine that can go up to 1GB RAM? that actually sounds kinda impressive
Well.. you got to have 128MB sticks, and those was rare to non existing.. well at least at launch, you probably could get them the year after.
And i would not call it the mid 90s. the 195Mhz R10 000 version of Indigo 2 was introduced in 1997, i would call that late 90s. Bu that time the 300Mhz Pentium 2 was that as far as i could find could at least in theory support 2GB of ram. It was also by this point Intel start surpassing MIps in performance. When the first Indigo 2 was introduced it was about 4 times more powerful than the fastest Intel based PC, by 1997 it was basically a wash.
The Power Macintosh 7500 can take up to 1GB RAM and that machine was from 30 years ago.
Back in the 90s, I was working at a database company. At that time, there were many different UNIX flavors, and I was the lead engineer responsible for porting to one of those flavors from Solaris, our development platform.
Our SGI porting team had received new SGI workstations, which, compared to my Sun workstation, were very sleek and even had webcams. I really wanted one of those as my workstation, but I wasn’t working on porting to the SGI operating system.
YES! FINALLY SOME SGI CONTENT WOOOO
You are mad scientist of computer world. Great 😊
I had an Octane 2 a few years ago. I got rid of it last year because I moved and it was heavy. I tried to find it a home with a UA-camr or something, but nobody was interested in one that wasn't already fully functional. Thankfully, a friend of mine -- the one who I had given the other one I picked up at the same time -- wanted it.
I got an Octane from a hospital where it ran their MRI. I had to pull a scsi cdrom from my powermac 8500 and wipe the machine to a fresh install of IRIX. You missed the fun of doing that with 25 cd roms and crossing fingers to get it done. To my surprise it worked! I still have my octane and even upped the weird ram so I play with it on occasion. Doom plays well, and I got an iris version of Basilisk so I have Mac OS 7 running in emulation. It’s such a beast and I love the damn thing!
Back in 2002, I had one of these, plus a lot of other SGI models. Makes me sad that I gave them all away in 2005 or i'd be minted by now, either from making UA-cam content about my collections or just selling them off as they were maxed out with specs. These are far too expensive to re-buy now. I got mine for £200 or less, as back then, a lot of people were getting rid of them as scrap. :(
I knew a Jurassic Park reference was coming lol
in 1995 you could have bought three brand new Ford Taurus for $50000
Oh no I knew he wouldn’t stop at innocent Macs. He is hurting the indigos now. This man must be stopped!
8bitguy appears with a Dremel.
That very expensive SGI machine is slower than a Raspberry PI 5.
Maybe even a raspberry pi 4
The older BlueScsi work as I recall, but are slower than period correct SGI machines. My hope is the newer Raspberry Pi chips can help make the speed tolerable.
In the 90's I operated an Indigo machine as a server for a high tech printer one of the things I found on there was flight simulator software and many jets would meet a firey death as I never quite figured out how to land.
I only dreamed of even seeing a machine like this back in the day. Thank you...
Flexion on Mastodon is the SGI Wizard. Their collection of workstations and rack servers is amazing.
oh neat, Sean's doing SGI stuff now!
What a memory... not used one since I was at Uni in the late 1900s as the two student flatbed scanners were attached to a pair of these (otherwise we were all Sun workstations).
And... upgrades! Can't wait 🙂
So awesome man! I can't believe these could go up to 1 gig of ram back then, that is insane!
Excellent! I have an IP28 as well. I was struggling with the Reanimator install. You've inpsired me. I hope to see you at VCF SoCal soon!
Beautiful. I need more IRIX action. I need to see this SGI gaming PC!
In 93 an Indy was my desktop and we use a Indy 2 with a rendering board (don't remember the specs) I just remember that machine was $100,000 system. We were using sofimage on both systems. Very cool to see these systems again. I do remember the Indy had 4 4gb drives on it and we keep running out of space
I still have an SGI O2 in my office, it's a very dusty paperweight but a reminder of times gone by.
Courtesy of a very large research grant, I had one of these SGIs on my desk back in 1995. I did computer simulations and 3D graphics on it. I used it for 5 years.
Love the cameo by LGR's corner packard bell, I hope it is one that survived his storm damage!
Awesome. Love seeing these things! Can't believe you've got the keyboard AND monitor too!! I do have a SPARCstation but I'd love an SGI machine.
Nice screwdriver! I've always been fascinated with the old Unix stations from the 90s too. I owned a couple of alphas for a while and would love to get hold of an SGI. I guess to eBay I go!
Wow, amazing! Brought lot many memories back. Thanks for nice work.
Off topic but I think the keyboard sounds quite nice!
If it's the actual SGI Granite, it uses white Alps switches, which are really solid.
It's amazing to me how quickly SGI became obsolete. I had an internship in 2002 to learn Maya. I was using a Sony laptop, when another animator was using a $30K SGI tower that the organization had bought just a few years before. We decided to benchmark Maya on my PC laptop vs the SGI behemoth. My laptop was almost 2x as fast.
That’s wild
Great video!! Damn i saw one as a kid at the macworld expo in Frankfurt. Was blown away by it and still love the design of those boxes.
I have absolutely no professional or personal connection with these machines, but I'm still fascinated to see them. Darned right, I'll stick around. Especially if you end up cracking the case so we can get a gander at how SG designed the insides.
Also, thanks to you, I now desperately want one of those gorgeous turquoise SG cases. Empty or otherwise. Dang it! ;)
aside from needing to get a scsi cdrom drive working on mine (and finding or buying a scsi hdd alternative), my giant purple boat anchor works fine.
and thankfully, now that there's some good options, i'll get around to finally getting that sorted out. full set of irix discs, proper ungodly heavy monitor with 13w3.
sigh. one of these days.
It's how Animators worked it out.
At my old job in the 90s we had a bunch of SGI machines. At the time I had AOL at home, which was not exactly the Internet. At work they had an Indigo connects to a T1 line and that was my first real experience on the World Wide Web. I’d write URLs down and try to access them via AOL… no dice!
SCSI2SD 5 is a terrible choice for the Indigo... It's way too slow. You need at least a V6 or AzulSCSI/BlueSCSIv2 to get anywhere near decent performance on that machine. Even they aren't adequate performance wise. By the way I'd recommend LOVE for installing, I've used various methods in the past and LOVE is absolutely amazing. You just run it on your PC and it acts as an install server. You're gonna need the T-RAM upgrades on that IMPACT card to make it viable for some gaming, ie; you'd need MAX IMPACT. Either that or use the o2 you showed earlier, it has unified texture memory (like AGP memory).
What would be a good choice?
That's a beautiful monitor.
It's worth pointing out how unusual having network install options built into the system firmware was in the 90s. It was really only found on high end workstations
First all happy new year and what great video and finding that machine was pure luck can't wait to see the new upgrades !
My old workstations liked this video. Especially my Iris Crimson :)
We had SGI workstations (older models than this) in my CS Graphics classes at university. Those were my favorite classes, and I ogled over the specs of the Indigo systems when those were announced. Definitely couldn’t get one for personal use back then.
Oooooooooooooooooooooh. I tinkered with SGI computers back in the day. Gosh, I miss those.
We had a computer room at university decked out with Indigo workstations. They made easy work of surfing the web.
And much like that Taurus, SGIs were also Super High Output
My university ran all of the College of Engineering hosts off of SGI mainframes, they had multiple refrigerator sized SGI computers. I am certain each one of those was wayyy more than $50k. I also remember SGI came in and had like a pop-up showroom demo for all of their available desktop workstations in, like, 1992, and I remember how amazing they all looked, and how expensive they all were. Of course the intention was to show them off to all the researchers who had grant money burning a hole in their pockets, but I was an undergrad at the time and it just seemed so unattainable at the time.
That is a pretty impressive stack of SGI machines you have there! I guess I now have to go back and see if you have done any content on that O2. It was basically my dream computer back in the day :)
I remember the compiler and debugger on these. It was excellent.
I remember those toys and our room full of Sparc20 pizza-boxes.
That was a 1st gen SHO, by 96 they were on the 3rd gen SHO with the 3.4l Yamaha V8 and slipping cam pulleys. The auto only jellybean SHO that was barely distinguishable from the regular Taurus looks wise. You had to get the cam pulleys welded to the cams to keep them from slipping.
Can you do a video on "how to make a server from your old power Macintosh/iBook/Performa/PowerBook etc.. or a video on the Commodore Pet, restoration and upgrading? Thank you.
Used one of those SGIs in college for 3D animation and VR. Between those and the O2 workstations, the school had a main server or computer (may have been an Onyx) that everything was networked to. It was the size of a small fridge. Ah, the good ol' days.
This makes me miss my old original Iris Indigo with the Elan Graphics option. It was old when I got it, but it was still a great machine. I sometimes wish I had kept it.
Great video Sean! Always wanted one of these when I saw them a few years ago.
I also have such a love of that era of unix workstations. It's just too bad that these days they're soo thin on the ground that they're disturbingly expensive. Plus I'm on the wrong side of the planet, so even if one does show up these days it's impossibly expensive shipping 😢
Guess I'm lucky that I did manage to get together a reasonable collection 20 years ago when they were around their price floor. But some of the later stuff I would've loved to find happened at an era that I had zero disposable funds (actually less than zero, it took 10 years to pay off the debt of just trying to survive those years)
Those are so cool. I remember when I got a first IBM compatible computer and it could do graphs! Wow. The future!