SGI Octane: What can a $30,000 computer from the 90's do ?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 14 тра 2024
- In the 90's one company dominated the world of 3d graphics SGI, used in industry, university science labs, and the film and tv industry. They where used to edit and create some of our favourite Films and TV shows (and some terrible ones too).
My thanks to Nikki and Bunty ( / nikkiandbunty / nikkiandbunty ) for lending their voice talents, you can see them streaming on twitch on Friday nights. - Наука та технологія
So nostalgic for SGI boxes. Irix was my favorite OS of any I have used. I was hugely disappointed to have to switch to NT by around 2000. My friend and mentor Richard Baily rendered the entire building collapse for the film Fight Club on two Octanes in his basement. I helped him a bit with shader development. 24 hours a frame but rock solid.
That's one heck of a scene to have been involved in, still looks great to this day. Are you still working on NT or has your work shifted to Linux now.
@@RetroBytesUK Workstations are windows or Linux, render farms are Linux.
That scene was pretty extraordinary for the time. 9 million individually animated building fragments, textured and ray traced. That was the last big time use of the TDI renderer.
TWENTY FOUR HOURS per frame??? And I thought three hours on my machine were bad. Ouch.
That scene looks kinda trash for cgi, cool story tho :/
@@devondetroit2529 Twenty three years ago it was pushing the bleeding edge.
Maybe the biggest failure of SGI is how much raw talent they leaked out over the years. They spawned more rivals from their own ranks than perhaps any other technology company in history. Great video video though, and nice collection!
Staff retention really seamed to be an issue for them, as was staff burn out. I've read accounts of the experience of staff working on project reality sgi really pushed them to the limit.
On some forums I've heard ex-SGI devs reminisce about how they all left moved to some startup named NVidia and realized on their first day of the job that they were essentially working with exactly the same people, just at a new company.
I used to live down the street from them and would visit friends working there in the cafeteria. By the late 1990's the place was a dead letter. Too many H1B and too much off-shoring of even the engineering. Always the death of any innovative US based business, particularly so back in those days.
@@halgari well.. in 1998 untill 2005 nvida grew about the speed sgi shrunk
This little startup sounds like it could go places
Here's a true story: Way, way back in the mid 90s, I was wandering about in Central London and happened upon Soho Square. There was SGI's UK HQ (quite close to Paul McCartney's MPL Communications, as it happens). As a young graphic designer with an interest in 3D design I decided (who knows why?) to pop inside SGI 'just to have a look'. Amazingly, not only did I get to have a look about, but one of the sales reps there allowed me to enter the demo room and gave me a free hour or so playing about on a top-end SGI system. He must have known I had no intention of spending any money but was nevertheless perfectly accommodating. I was just a curious young designer dreaming of a system I would never, ever be able to get my eager mitts on in the real world - and yet there I was, not only in SGI's UK HQ but mucking about with one of their top-end systems. This is an experience I have never forgotten, and I have always been especially grateful to that anonymous SGI sales rep. What a guy. What a time.
He knew that the penniless young designers of today are the budget controlling middle managers of tomorrow. First you sell the dream, then you sell the machine.
Wow, I had the same experience, but at school. SGI had brought up their "demo van" (A tractor-trailer with everything from octanes to 4-6 rack wide, top end onyx 2 systems). I probably spent two hours in there playing around. Strangely, despite being there for EE work, not a single other person I knew was interested. I don't think they had ANY idea what it even was. I made the decision that day that I'd eventually own one of these. My god were those top end onyx 2 machines crazy. I'm always amazed at how much tech from that stuff ended up in PC's. Everything from the 3D hardware acceleration to ccNUMA multiprocessor stuff to the 3D graphics API's (openGL). I did eventually buy a couple of o2's. I used one of them for 3D animation in blender for years. Their openGL performance at the time was worlds better than what my PC had. My PC wasn't shabby either though. Dual coppermine celeron's in a BP-6 board. For not supporting multiprocessors, those celerons were sure fast in multiprocessor setups!
Damn, they didn't even open the effing door for 18-ish me in 1998...
Odd, I started on SGI systems in the early '90s and their HQ was not in London as far as I recall. From my memory, it was in Thales in Wiltshire and then it moved to Arlington Business Park near Theale, just south Reading - I worked there for a while in '96/7.
SGI did have a huge presence in Soho though - I once interviewed at Cinecite there and they had huge SGI machines, mostly for rendering, iirc, as well as lots of desktop/deskside systems.
Working at Dreamworks in the late 90s, when animation was still very much in the hybrid world of 2D/3D, I would routinely go home and knock out test shots on my PC in a fraction of the time those agonizingly slow Octanes would take. I remember opening one of their storage rooms once, a little smaller than your average bedroom perhaps, stacked with boxes of Octanes. I said - "Look... two million dollars worth of boat anchors!"
Damn, PCs had already beaten them by the latter end of that decade?
@@sbanner428 Absolutely. First-hand witness here to account for it. I'm sure there are many, many others.
@@atlanteum That's nuts, thanks for telling me
@@sbanner428 You are most welcome, friend!
You one sassy motor scooter
I got this as an ad and I ended up liking the channel!
Same
@@mbrit same
I just tweeted about SGI yesterday.
Big G is watching 😂
I always love those
a quality YT advertised video is the rarest occurrence on UA-cam. 99% of the time the advertised video is utter trash created by people who think you need some talent and an equal amount of self promotion and business savvy to be successful as a UA-cam creator. like running a channel people enjoy can be something thats grinded to success and dont understand that many channels that are popular are like this because the channel was made with no more motive than creating good videos about something they are passionate and knowledgeable about. not as a potential side hustle to keep their wallet full.
Why did this come up as an 'ad' rather than a recommendation? First ad I’ve ever purposely clicked on and I ended up subscribing.
same
@@TimotheousMaximus same
Ya why
Hahahah same
Same.
I worked for a computer animation company in the 1980s, where the department I worked in designed our own high end frame buffers to get video into and out of our software and hardware system package. We originally designed for the Sun 3 platform, and later for SGI. We had many SGI machines around, so it was great to take this walk down memory lane. Thanks!
It would have been cool if in these 17 minutes we got to see what a $30,000 computer from the 90s can do...
This video was as he stated “Derpy”
It didn't cuz you know nothing about what you're watching. The google educated.
@@gore14 yeah okay buddy been building computers for 25 years 👍. We all wanted to see a collection of games from the 2000 era played on this thing so we could 'see' what it can do
Thank you for saving me 16 minutes cheers
I’d say about 99.9% of the population doesn’t know anything about 1990’s video editing systems, so you’re in good company
Finally, ACTUALLY GOOD ADS
Indeed
i suppose yeah
I AGREE
I strongly agree with this assessment.
Only ad I've ever deliberately clicked on.
SGI came to my high school and showed my computer class one of their systems. It was SO impressive and I so badly wanted to have one, or even work for SGI to be around them. By the time I made it into the professional workforce SGI had all but disappeared.
My buddy's dad had an architect firm that had 5 onyx's , in 95 it was like seeing a Lamborghini. They showed off 3d renders of buildings where you could virtually walk around the design pre build. Was awesome for the time!
By the title I was hoping to see what capabilities SGI Octane has being pushed to the limits by someone who knew how to use it possibly enhancing it with updated software.
Thats not possible in this case.
I was hoping to know if it could run Crisis.
running modern games is a no go, the gpu does not contain enough memory for one,, and many other problems with the hardware itself and modern 3d applications
@@pootersnacks so your telling me a 1k modern Pc absolutely shreds a 20k pc in this era? And u kids think we went to the moon, good lord cgi destory us
@@chrisroberts8607 im telling you a 300 dollar pc shreds that thing
Intel managed to destroy nearly all of their competition with a product that never worked. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
That it is, what makes it even more surprising is the whole initial cpu design was not their's but came from a designer a dumb terminals who brought in Intel as the silicon partner. When the terminal manufacture abandoned the project, the IP was transferred to Intel in lew of payment for the work they did.
@@RetroBytesUK Not to be pedantic like that "ackchyually" meme :), but what you're referring to (the dumb terminal manufacturer was a company called Datapoint) was Intel's 2nd design of CPU in 1972, the 8008 (more about this in a bit). Intel's first CPU design was the 4004 in 1971--it was a Japanese manufacturer of calculators (Busicom), not Datapoint, who partnered with Intel in '71 to develop their first CPU, the 4004. It was initially designed for a calculator model of Busicom's that they decided to cancel during development, where Busicom then transferred their IP to Intel to compensate financially for its development, where Intel then sold the resulting CPU, the 4004, on their own as a commercial product, and their first CPU chip.
What you're probably referring to is later on when the Intel 8008 (their 2nd CPU) was introduced in 1972--it too came about from Intel entering a similar partnership (with practically the same outcome) with Datapoint (then known as CTC, or the Computer Terminal Corporation), who indeed made video display terminals (some of the first in the computing industry at the turn of the 70s, the first "glass teletypes"). Datapoint already had their 2nd model of terminal, the 2200, built from discrete TTL logic (much like their 3300, their debut product in 1968 using discrete logic chips from Texas Instruments), but approached Robert Noyce of Intel to see if the 2200's TTL chipset could be integrated into one chip.
Intel responded by developing the 1201 CPU (the predecessor to the 8008) for the Datapoint 2200, but unfortunately in the end they couldn't meet Datapoint's launch date for the CPU to be used in their terminals, plus the demo version of the 1201 didn't perform to Datapoint's desired specs. So, Datapoint carried on with manufacturing the 2200 terminal with conventional TTL logic chips, and also surrendered their IP for the 1201's development to Intel as a result, who made some further improvements to it, renamed it the 8008, and offered it commercially in 1972 much like the 4004.
@@RyanSchweitzer77 Erm... I think RetroBytes is actually referring to the Itanium range, a series of processors introduced in the early 2000s as Intel's proposed answer to a backwards-compatible 64-bit CPU. The range lasted for a number of years, but never gained the market acceptance that they'd envisioned. This was for a number of reasons (the compiler issue referred to in the video, but also the fact that the backwards compatibility (essential at the time, as almost no software was written for 64-bit) was achieved through emulating an x86 CPU, rather than having the ability to run x86 code in a true native fashion. This emulation layer meant that running x86 code on an early Itanium was significantly slower than on a contemporary x86 CPU, and was left for dust by the AMD 64-bit offerings that were released shortly thereafter that were able to run x86 code in true native fashion (i.e. without an emulation layer slowing it down)).
@@RetroBytesUK *in lieu
lu lu lu lu. Data is still the best.
I was watching LGR and got this video as an ad, perfect timing, and now I’m a subscriber! Love your channel
Same
Same
Same
Same!
YT algorithm is getting it right... This is scary...
As as (relatively) young Flame op, this was awesome to see old Flame running on original hardware. The reels are so iconic- I'm glad they still exist.
I studied 3D graphics (mostly then Alias Wavefront Maya) at a university in Sweden 1999-2000, and the classroom we all worked from had all SGI machines running NT, I cannot remember the name of them. What I however discovered fairly fast was that I could run Maya just fine on my newly built mid tier PC at home, so I spent very little time in the actual classroom. I guess the SGI machines in question already was a bit outdated. Another fun thing about that education was that at one point we had a guest teacher, an employee of Alias Wavefront, and one of the first questions he asked the class was: So... how many of you have pirated Maya at home? And a few hands were slowly and reluctantly raised, to which he replied "Good! Then you know what software you want the companies you will be working for later to licence."
Yep. That was the business model back then. Allow home user piracy to gain market share in business market. Adobe did that to.
@@trashyraccoon2615 If that was the business model, why not say "free for personal/student use?" To me, that was always an extremely weak justification of pirates.
@@wadesworld6250 I agree and I am not an advocate of piracy, but I think they just knew they wouldn’t be able to defeat privacy. So that’s what they went with. Its a strategy to achieve market share and it worked. I pirated it back then but as soon as if became affordable I went legit. I am pretty sure if they told people it was free that wouldn’t have worked out well for them
@@wadesworld6250
Because free seems like you're getting less value than pirate.
He's not wrong....
I feel like Cray was the stuff of legend for casual-computer nerds in the 80's. Silicon Graphics held that title in the 90's. A fun walk down memory lane... cheers.
I remember being a kid and desperately wanting a machine like that just to play video games on lol.
Yes I remember distinctly wanting a Cray -XMP supercomputer for personal use in the early 90's. If Silicon Graphics had the vision to perpetuate the Cray brand by setting computing speed and storage records, eventually efficiency standards then SGI would still exist today imo.
@@michaelskywalker3089 I worked at Cray in the mid 80s, and actually HAD a Cray XMP for personal use! (at least sometimes) It was awesome. SGI was a big part of my life in the 80s/90s.
For supercomputing, yes. For ridiculous-end number-crunching, Cray has been the bees' knees since I was in high school (The first Cray-1 - in working order - is in the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology.) I first saw a Cray X-MP in a college textbook - in 1989, I actually got to see one in person - at the Naval Research Laboratory - the corporate research lab of the United States Navy. (The X-MP is best known for a particular structure known as "the world's most expensive love seat" - and that phrase is in a college textbook.) I have said - multiple times - that Buzzard's Point - home of the Headquarters' United States Coast Guard, is the second-worst location in official Washington. The WORST location in "official Washington" is owned by the Naval Research Laboratory - and it has been there since World War One. Why does it suck so bad? DCWater's Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant is dead next door.(I worked there for two years -1989-1991.) Yet it has the second-biggest collection of hard-science brains in the nation - outstripping NIH, but second to NSA - who they work with.
@@incognitotorpedo42 When I was 19 before I went to college I always imagined the extraordinary possibilities if people had access to massively parallel computers or vector-based risc-based computer chips using efficient buses. Coupled with the massive storage and robust chip based storage a credible alternative to the largely serial based x86 platform could have been a main part of 21st century computing today for everyone. Ty for response; I only had access to 286 386 and the occasional Macintosh living in Ontario Canada I never really read about or investigated SGI machines till much later.
My parents met while working at SGI. They were married in 1988 and I was born in 89, same year SGI teamed with Cray. Watching the technology revolution happen in real time, at ground level and as I was growing up, truly felt like I lived in a different world at times. Nostalgic. My brother and I have joked about getting the Silicon Graphics logo tattooed since it was literally our entire world till around 98 or so. Great video
Great memory - isn't funny how tech becomes such a strong nostalgia...not sure why that is!
If I remember, Cray marketing said that SGI's HPCs were entry-level. Cray literally stole his technology. An Octane before acquisition of Cray: not possible, as for Les Onyx / Origin 2000
Cray Research (later Cray Inc.) Had a place up in Eagan, MN. They had a large data center their. My dad worked their when it was held by United Properties, WamNet!, Welsh, then eventually EcoLab. No idea what Cray and SGI did their, but they had left behind a LOT of commerical grade network hardware behind, my dad was able to acquire under the new owners at the time. It would have gone to waste anyway.
@@javgroman lots of copper to be scavgned
Do itttt
The thought of having the privilege being one of the only people in the world to run Doom at a high frame rate is insane to me. Awesome video man 10/10 subscribe worthy
I had one of these SGI O2 systems (as well as a Indigo2) in the 90's.
They were amazing! Especially loved the modular design.
I can thank being on an LGR video and accidentally tapping the next video button and immediately being shown an SGI machine and now i’m a subscriber. Good content mate. Keep it up.
LGR did a video on the indigo 2
SGI also managed to sign an accord with Microsoft in which they gave them all of their IP. Supposedly they were going to develop things together but Microsoft decided instead to go alone and release DirectX
Microsoft had a habit of pulling the rug out from under their "partners".
Microsoft’s strategy, embrace, extend, extinguish.
Microsoft is evil. But they are my kind of evil. I bought $30k worth at around 25 USD/share a decade or so ago, and now it's gone up over 10-fold. I don't care if they decommission Windows 10 in 2025, they've earned my goodwill. INTC (Intel) might also be a buy now for a decent return in ten years (planned hardware obsolescence).
@@raylopez99 as new computers will have to use the new security chip for encryption to work on windows. I agree that it will make a lot of people make the switch. It will be interesting to see whether business do the push to upgrade, as many of them don't care about what version windows their CFO have on its PC and believe the less you do the better. Larger corporation are better at being aware or have someone paid to be. But as everything is moving to leasing hardware as a subscription model it's likely the transition will actually be adopted by users and not ignored. Made my sister buy some intel stock just as the pandemic hit and it made her the largest profit on a stock so far. But that isn't why intel is a popular stock to hold. She jokingly proclaimed to now be a tech investor. Good luck!
@@raylopez99 Bill Gates was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein, may karma be your friend.
As a geek/nerd kid growing up in the 80s / 90s, having an SGI box was the stuff of my dreams.
That was so funny! Their IT department had a seemingly unlimited budget AND the most animated email client ever! :) I was an SGI guy during this time and thought the same, very funny!
It’s amazing how the video capture technologies of various eras changes your mental picture of those times. Seeing the mini-DV footage instantly took me back to all the home videos my dad took of my childhood in the 90’s and early 00’s.
I love how a piece of technology can transport us back to another time.
@@RetroBytesUK I have a question this doesn't have a disk drive does it if hooked up to one how would it's hardware handle a modern 360 /PS4 video game?
I still capture DV footage every day! It's not bad actually, given a good enough camcorder. It looks a little better in PAL than NTSC for various reasons.
I worked for an SGI reseller in a large residential garage. Inventoried systems and shipped rigs and cards. Had a couple hundred Indigo2 systems. Ran a Onyx2 half filled with 60+ CPUs running the Mendel screensaver to help heat the garage in Minnesota winters. Was a long time ago now. Almost 20 years. Some tool manufactures in MN still used SGI systems to model tools in the 00’s and got to service a few.
IBM machines turned into boat anchors. SGI became garage heaters.
How big was the screen the Mendel screensaver displayed on?
@@Dong_Harvey The normal 20" SGI monitor.
Imagine how rich you would be if you mined BT then.
@Karl with a K That many CPU boards.. yes. It was around half capacity. The blowers pushed heat out and warmed us in the two car garage sized front office.
I joined a packaging company in the mid 90's as a design manager to find 200K worth of Indy workstations, presentation screens, webcams etc sitting in a cupboard. They had been bought by the company to run Delcam 3d Modelling software but they couldn't get it to work properly. We got the whole system up and running with a good few hours of hard work. small scale storage was onto floptical drives and we did presentations to clients via video conferencing over ISDN. In person we used the LCD screens that sat on top of a OHP to present 3d rendered animations of products. Designs were printed out using wax dye sublimation printer. We even did rapid prototyping using stereolithography. It was a brave new world :)
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! We had 8 O2s and 2 Octanes in my college program. Using Edit for the first time after trying to deal with Premiere on consumer hardware was amazing. I used Maya's NURBS support to design the shape of the body for our Solar Car.
Thanks for pulling up memories! I started my professional career on an Octane 1. A bit later we got the Octane 2 and then the red FUEL which was fast, but really unstable.
We used these machines for simulation of industrial robots. When later the physical robots were installed in the factory, we often transported the *heavy* Octane and the *heavy* 20" monitor to she shopfloor to help finalizing the robot programs that were preprogrammed in simulation.
A few years later the same thing could be done with a laptop. The upcoming gaming hardware on PCs was what made SGIs obsolete.
I remember being on the CeBit one year. There was some Autocad system where you could rotate the rendered (with faces!) Space Shuttle model in real time! My PC at home needed about *one hour* to draw a single view of this model as wireframe!
I shared this video with my father who worked there. As a kid, a couple of times we went into the office overnight and had a LAN party on the network. Doom and the tank game are burned into my brain. It was so far ahead of anything at the time. Great memories, thank you.
that compact 'low end' model you spoke of? I literally took one of those apart while working in IT back in 2019. Such a fascinating piece of tech history. Such interesting hardware design.
Agreed. I often take my o2 apart just to show people. The pitch of those memory controller IC's is insane. And, they even designed the board with weird angles for them, probably to align timings or create equal impedances or something. But the ridiculous fine pitch of the board and ultra tight packing and especially the cooling design, just crazy good. I learned a LOT of design ideas from those machines. Especially thermal design.
the pcb boards in 80s 90s were cancerous just a big fyi anyone wanting to dissect old component
Reminds me of the time I did a fixed assets audit at an IT company, We kept finding £10,000 Sun Sparkstations and SGI machines just laying around all over the place. Also found loads of mobile phones in a cupboard unopened. A case of the IT Dept spending going out of control.
@Lurch: Amen to that.This is what it was like when I built my last big swap RAID. I wanted the fastest swap I could build so I went with 16 drives total in raid 0, then stuffed in 16 disks total that spin at 15,000 RPM, all connected to a big 16 port card. Latency was higher of course, but the throughput was about 30% of what a pure ram disk was on that machine, which is insane. Then, for extra giggles, to lower the latency, I short stroked the drives by only allocating the first bits of each drive so I was using the fastest part of the platters and limiting the distance the heads would seek from the inner to outer track. When I bought the disks, the lady was like "Okay, I'll pull one from the box". I immediately stopped her and asked "How many in that box?". She said "I think there's like 20 to 24 of them?". I told her "Just make sure they're all the same 15K disk models, close it up, tape it shut and slap my shipping label on it. I'll take em all". She was floored. But let's be honest here, the disks were only 40 gigs each. By then, terabyte disks were common so nobody wanted them. Since the ONLY thing I was using them for was the sheer spindle speed and sheer number of platters, it didn't matter if they were 10 gigs, they were stupidly useful for me. So, I built that gigantic array and did some crazy projects that require huge swap like sifting the ENTIRE apollo image archive for unknown panorama's. I really should have told someone about those projects. I did them YEARS before anyone else (about half a decade to a decade before anyone else in the case of the apollo pictures). Ah well, I do that stuff for my own reasons I suppose, not fame. :P
Lovely setting, great content, and a great way to spend my evening.
Thanks!
That's nice of you to say, thanks.
Worked there for a bit in 97-98, and the writing was on the wall so to speak. Had indy2 at home, and later o2/origin. Everyone was big into using an emulator to run windows programs, which was odd - but some people needed excel. The one thing that was super cool was the high speed cross bar bus they had (somewhat of a paralleled lane 2Gbit) - this was much better an idea then current PCIe which is master-slave oriented and would allow multiple transactions active between members at same time. They also numa like architecture where multiple cpu's, cards, and chassis share same address space - very cool but paralleling things was not well understood.. IRIX was pretty nice also - and pretty much everyone in the office knew everything about IRIX. I could ask the receptionist how exactly lpr daemon works and they would know!
Windows has always dominated in terms of having the largest number of well-supported third-party programs to choose from.
CCNUMA Cache Coherent Non Uniform Memory Architecture. You could read the memory on another node modify it, write it etc and not have to worry about cache conflicts etc, it was all handled transparently. Super easy to develop for. All over high bandwidth CrayLink interconnect, a technology that wasn't actually designed by Cray.
@@deusexaethera At this point in Window's life, that and compatibility is ALL it really has going for it IMO.
@@johntrevy1 Well once you have a forced incumbency, you can basically do whatever the hell you like, and MS has been doing that for ages. They've been able to put out weird, hated versions of windows for a bit now, and doing things no one asked them to, and pushing tech that no one wants. Incumbency and just generally being everywhere and having loads of cash to throw around has more or less made them immune to what happened to all their rivals, like SGI.
I'd like that little closed environment to be opened up a lot more, but they're just so entrenched everywhere.
On PCIe - I think you might be confusing PCIe with the original 1990s PCI standard, which (in small systems) behaves more or less as you say. But PCI Express aka PCIe is a later standard which tossed the original PCI electrical layer and replaced it with a point-to-point only link architecture. Because PCIe is pure point-to-point, not a multidrop bus, and because the protocol makes it trivial for every device to be a "master" (just send out a memory read or memory write packet), crossbar switches are extremely common.
Technically, crossbars are even possible in classic PCI. It defines standardized ways of bridging multiple PCI busses together, and the bridge devices can act as crossbars between busses. However, PCI crossbars were much less common than PCIe crossbars are today. (If you're reading this on a non-obsolete PC, its CPU has an embedded PCIe crossbar.)
I'm so glad to have discovered this! I have a soft, nostalgic spot for things like this, especially for SGI/Sun/Alpha boxen and antiquated OSes like SunOS/Solaris, Digital UNIX/HP-UX, IRIX and AIX!
I remember taking a field trip to an sgi location in Orlando back when I was in high school in the 90's. I remember they had a simulator room that featured a giant parabolic screen and one of my classmates got to take the controls of a simulated fighter jet. They showed off a variety of their workstations, this video brought back a lot of nostalgia for those peak 90's case designs.
I work at a television station and back in the day, we had two of the O2's running a graphics system called Liberty.
I was a Liberty op as well as Dubner and Quantel! Those were the days! $100+ per hour as a freelancer!
XFS was and still is an amazing file system, especially for direct IO.
try JFS.
A friend of mine worked as tech support for SGI. I remember when several of us would go to his work and play 'bzfest', the multiplayer Battlezone game (shown at 10:08); this game has been ported over to an online version. Good times.
Thanks for doing this video. I got into video editing in the 90's and recall one of my professors talking about SGI.
As a person who did circuit repairs on SGI hardware in the early 2000s, you'd be interested to know that the Origin 3000 server line ran a version of linux as it's main OS, along with those Intel CPUs. Considering they had to make a lot of changes to linux to accommodate the truly huge number of CPUs and memory available across the NUMA bus on their variable server architecture, I'm surprised they didn't just port IRIX over, but there you are. Every workstation used an Indy as a terminal to access the systems to be repaired. Doom ran on them, but barely. Of course, I never played games during work hours. Nope. Not me. (cough)
It's not playing, it's using a commercial off-the-shelf software package as a performance benchmark.
@@deusexaethera And a stability test.
@@Megalomaniakaal : If it can't even run Doom reliably, how can you possibly trust it with enterprise software? It's your responsibility, nay your obligation, as an IT admin to test the equipment thoroughly.
You lost me here. Origin 3000 with Intel Cpus and a version of Linux? We had a small Origin 2000. If I remember correctly for a test they scaled the Origin 3000 up 2048 processors in a single image and that's not Linux. Do you mean Altix 3000?
Would anybody have the code for this CCNUMA support supposedly running on Linux?, is it available upstream for kernal uses? Or is there just better stuff by now?
SGI was a dream machine when I was a kid. I remember my friend telling me about silicone graphic workstations and we dreamed of owning one. Thank you for making a dream come true, in video form.
Wow! Great video on the rise and fall of SGI. I hadn't seen one since the 90s and frankly had forgotten about the company.
Witty high quality content. I’ve never heard of SGI but found it very informative none the less. Cheers.
Id love to see more about silicon graphics for sure!
I think I may well have to do some more, that O2 is probably the next SGI machine I’ll doing something with.
More SGI content on UA-cam would be lovely.
@@RetroBytesUK the O2 was a cool little pod. I still have and wear my O2 baseball cap. lol (and I keep a R4000 Indigo Elan running the tile screensaver because I'm sentimental. man, I loved their gear.
Dodoid’s channel had a whole multipart history of SGI a few years ago.
I remember playing Quake ( not sure if it was I or II ) in a field trip on one of this machines that was maxed out for graphics around 1999, that was mind-blowing, then they put it in a Onyx2 and I was left without words.
I never looked the same way at my PC from that time, pentium II 350@400 + Ati Rage Fury.
I was working on compling quake for it, but I needed to update ggc first to build it, and then build an new set of libraries, so it was a little too far down the rabbit hole to get done for this video, but I still intend to get it all built.
@@RetroBytesUK That would be awesome. A year on, how's it going?
Tye fury was a crap graphics card...if you would have updated that part that vintage computer actually ran good
I still have my SGI/NT 320. I was in college for computer animation in the mid-90s. We had O2s in the lab, but then SGI came by to advertise the NTs, and our jaws were all on the floor. Only juniors and seniors got to work on the machines back then in the mid-90s, because there were so few, and it was so slow to work on them. Everyone worked exclusively in wireframe, because if you hit the key to turn on shading, everything slowed down to a crawl. I remember a senior a few years above me hitting that key, then walking down the street to the gas station for food, hoping it would finally have finished just shading things by the time he returned. The NTs were not only doing shading in realtime, but with lights and particles. The lab was such a sleepy (and freezing) place, and nothing happened quickly, and then this new machine they were showing off just blew them out of the water. I had to have one, but they cost all the money I had in the world at that point. Years of allowances and birthday money, and a little bit of summer job money. I think the 320 was $5200, and I couldn't afford the couple thousand dollar monitor to go with it. But then I flew for about five years, before anything anyone else had could catch up. I could render our simple graphics from back then in seconds, vs the hours, and all night renders the seniors had to do before that. NT was such a weird version of Windows, though. So many things weren't compatible, and it didn't even have a BIOS, which really confounded a tech guy I tried to get help from on the phone ("all computers have BIOSes!" "Not this one!"). I couldn't get internal cards, because the voltage didn't match anything in stores. I wanted to hook up a Smart and Friendly (?) external CD burner, but the SCSI was some weird variant, so I had to track down the one place in the world I could find that had the 6-foot cable, which cost me $150, which killed back then, when I was so poor, post college. Pretty much no games worked on it, IIRC, and I had issues with some apps, too, because of the weird setup. It was quite and experience!
superb memories when I was an SGI Engineer back in late 1990's - To be honest the systems were so reliable I cannot remember ever having to fix one.
you forgot the diskdrive cabinets? storage issue, failed disks were very common back then
The O2 boxes - and not even considering how the plastic got super-brittle after a while and just started disintegrating - often suffer from memory failures. I have a number of O2s and we had tons at work for a time. My own O2+ has a memory failure at the moment and I haven't got around to fix it yet.
Can't recall any issues with the Octanes or Challenges.
(And of course I don't include disk problems - that's universal and happens everywhere. If anything, HP servers with SmartArray controllers would stick out as the most problematic in that respect, particularly during the transition to 2.5" disks)
Thanks for the great video. This took me back 15-20 years. In the early 2000s I worked for a UNIX hardware reseller, in fact it was the very same one (Novastar Solutions) that sold your Octane at some point. I recognized the asset tag and configuration sticker on the back right away. If I could see the "N" number any better I could look up the sales details on it. If it was sold between 2001-2006, then there's a good chance I built and loaded it. I was a huge SGI fanboy back then and although I worked on all makes of UNIX gear, SGI was always my favorite.
Thanks for letting me know about the asset tag, that's really interesting.
The best non-linear editing software Smoke from Discreet Logic ran on an Octane2. At Univision Sports we had two systems that we took with us to the 2002 and 2006 Soccer World Cup games. In 2002 we were stationed at the Comex Convention Center in Seoul Korea. Our Octane did not travel very well and our staff engineers only had enough knowledge for setup and nothing more. As luck would have it SGI was participating in a trade show that had just finished at the same convention center. They went out of their way to make our system run optimally. I've run just about every editing system invented and still have yet to run anything more stable or powerful (for its' time) as Smoke on an Octane. The system that we ran prior to this was Editbox by Quantel which might be familiar to our British friends.
I used an Onyx with Flame. For film post production. I still have not seen a video editor that had 3d composition .
Did smoke also have 3d composition ?
My dads worked on flame for the last 22 years (maybe more I’m not sure) I’ve seen him use it and it’s crazy just how little it’s gui has changed in all that time, I instantly recognised it. Dad must’ve worked on a computer like that back in the day.
Superb video, really enjoyed it. It took me down memory lane. Liked and subscribed 👍
Glad you enjoyed it thank you for the sub.
I was using these for work in the 90s. The downfall started when they rebranded as SGI - then sealed their fate when they introduced Intel based machines. I used the Octane for molecular modelling and it also controlled the equipment used to gather the data.
Windows NT and hardware transform and lighting on GeForce cards slaughtered SGI. and when maya was ported... that was the true end. My dual Pentium pro 200 absolutely STOMPED sgi's that cost more than my house.
@@asmischneythats crazy it sounds like computers progressed so fast back then looking at the timeline of these.
@@Evansmustard I loved it, it was glorious. Things feel stagnant now tbh. In the late 90’s and early 2000 it felt like every year things just got exponentially faster, now it’s just meh. I upgraded from a 1080 to a 3070 and it’s faster, but not blow me away faster.
@@asmischney was there a notable milestone point in the last 20 years where you felt like that progression slowed down to where it is today? Like when multi core cpus became common perhaps?
@@Evansmustard personally? around 2004 I think. yes when multicore stuff started coming out. I did get a jolt when m.2 drives came out, they certainly sped things up.
The last computer i had that was really exciting for me was a dual CPU amd opteron. Everything since then has felt incremental.
Putting an ad for this was worth it :)
Thanks for the blast from the past. Brings back long forgotten memories - good ones, of course.
Really nice video! I liked how you showcased - in brief - just how powerful that box was in its time :D
Brought back some fond memories of the one and only SGi workstation I saw in the flesh in the mid 90's.
I was working for a manufacturer of machine tools. The Snr Mechanical Engineer had an SGi box on trial - seeing simple, but _real time_ rendering of a moving model from CAD was mind blowing.
I remember at SOFTIMAGE in the old section of the building we worked in, there was multi-story server tower that when I first started working there, was full of Onyx, Crimson, Challenge, Octane, and other SGI (sgi) hardware. They were glorious: multi-coloured with beautiful carved flourishes in their surfaces and flashing lights and miniature screens. Only a few years later they were all gone - replaced by the tiny dull beige NT boxes that helped democratize the graphics market. Something was lost in that transition, and no amount of RGB and waifu ATX cases can ever equal those magical machines.
What years were you at Softimage? I was on the Sumatra advisory board when the whole XSI thing began. Those were the days..
@@GDawg2K2 I can't remember precisely, but 92/93 until 98/99 (I lived thru the Avid acquisition, flying into Boston Logan airport regularly)
I heard from former employees that when Microsoft acquired Softimage they rolled in and replaced all the desktop systems with PCs and told the engineers to get porting. IRIX was a special OS and very responsive for the available compute. It's scheduling efficiency real-time features and Graphics context switching were great. I suspect PCs running IRIX could have been good. Sadly back then people began to believe there was no desktop market outside of Windows, especially on the low end. What a loss as just about every major Unix desktop was better than Windows by leaps and bounds, although some system level stuff needed the command line.
@@dorbie That's somewhat true - Irix development certainly continued, as soft continued to launch and support products on that platform. While NT3.5 was a powerhouse OS and the SOFTIMAGE|3D 3.8 port to NT was really well-done, there were plenty of other tools that were still being used on Irix (Eddie, Toonz, etc.) and there really weren't any 3D graphics cards on the Windows market at the time that were even remotely comparable to even the lowest-end Irix platforms. When Intergraph and others started to sell higher-end Windows solutions, the bleeding started to become full-on amputation. The fact that file, print, and network servers transitioned to Windows NT didn't help, either.
I'm not sure that a PC could do much more than emulate Irix (probably poorly) as the hardware instruction set was completely different. It would require either losing Irix's benefits just for the sake of a GUI or asking Intel to make better chips and break backwards-compatibility with Windows. People today just don't recognize how much basing Windows on DOS set everything on that platform back!
@@ThomasKrul IRIX could have been implemented on x86 and that's unrelated to DOS of course. The amazing trouble free CCNUMA on high end platforms and the multimedia speed and integration would have been unavailable or hampered by the hardware & memory architecture. How much can never be known. Will McGovern told me the story of SOFTIMAGE. I'm not sure which location / group he was in when he saw it happen. There were rare individuals inside SGI (like Casey Leedham) who advocated for an IRIX MIPS low end push that would have been closer to how Apple weathered the storm and found growth. There were way too many "experts" with MBAs there and no Steve Jobs to ever allow that to happen. There were also technical advocates and significant investment internally to move to Linux. And of course the abandonment of MIPS investment in pursuit of Itanium and its VLIW hype.
SGI was very fortunate to have a really good high-end computing platform available at a time when such power was well beyond the capabilities of any home computer, yet in high enough demand for professional customers that the market for such high-end machines was viable. The problem is that computer technology would advance so rapidly in the late 90's and early 2000's that their window of relevance would shrink rapidly, and it seemed like management didn't have any idea how to adapt to the changing market. MIPS pretty much fell off the map after SGI acquired them, and multiple brain drains seemingly left the company directionless.
Having said all that, it's worth looking back on the stuff created on these early-90s SGI machines and note how good it still looks today. A lot of the stuff they pulled off (like the liquid Terminator effects), while not exactly perfect, still looks better than a lot of modern CGI. They really were pretty awesome machines for the time.
The same fate befell DEC - after Ken Olsen and other managers didn't adapt to the realities of Moore's Law.
I loved the look of those Octane machines. I fondly remember running car crash simulations on those in 2004, it was so exciting at the time to work on special hardware!
I somehow can't get enough of these SGI monstrosities. They are beautiful.
A really excellent video and great sense of humour - the British LGR. I look forward to many more RetroBytes videos.
I would not mind being thought of as the British LGR, I really enjoy watching LGR's videos.
Just realized that you’re using “Waitin for Katie” in the intro during SGI’s history part. Immediate subscription! Nice vid!
I think you might be the first person to spot it and not call it the music from Duggie.
@@RetroBytesUK I find it both funny and great that these kids cartoons use these old 20s / 30s tunes. I feel that more people should be aware of them. Some pretty good stuff!
Thank you so much for this insight! Really Fantastic! 😮🤯
Learned a lot from this video. Thanks for putting this together.
Excellent and fascinating history of the workstations and company :)
I must admit to always having a facination with SGI.
Im a simple man, I see SGI, I subscribe.
I like your logic.
Same
I remember working on those. Really loved they ease of access from a tech support perspective. Heavy as heck though! We used them at Disney Animation back in the day.
This video gives me LGR Oddware vibes and I LOVE IT. Keep up the great content! can't wait to see what comes next.
Gave me a nostalgic feeling. I was doing IT for the R&D department of a large company, and in the late 90s, they splurged on an Onyx setup for VR (they used VR for flow simulation stuff etc.). That machine looked pretty sweet next to all the Compaq Proliants we had at that time :-)
This 90s computer has 1.5 terabytes of storage and my modern gaming laptop has 768gb. Insane cuz I also video edit
Exactly! I find this to be a mind blowing amount of storage for the 90s. We had what in that time? Still megabytes? Maybe a few couple GBs? I remember still using floppy disks and whatnot at times
That would cost more than a house but yea i am running low on storage on my pc with 1 terabyte
Your "modern laptop" sucks.
@@starmc26 modern software sucks (far more space than it should really need)
@@virtualtools_3021 it takes up space because with larger drives these days, the software is less compressed. It's all contributing to the speed of the software. It's a trade-off.
My first job was supporting these. I was so lucky my company bought me an Indigo with a R4000( might have been R4400) processor with the large Sony monitor. I remember playing Doom on this computer. We used these at work to model metal flow in steel castings.
Awesome video, thanks for showing this!
1:56 "It's a UNIX system" HAHAHAHA
Managed a fleet of machines such as this from 1999 to mid 2000s for a company that did industrial and automotive design. Plenty of different models, from Indigo up to Octane2. We ran Alias Wavefront (now owned by Autodesk) plus a small set of other design and modelling software tools. A Citrix client would run Windows apps on the server. And Netscape Communicator was the browser and mail client. Everything was running from a Linux NFS server. And yes, had an Indy at my desk, complete with the webcam. The other IT guy write a script that would upload a picture at fixed intervals into our main intranet page. Interesting times. Fun fact, first time I had my lower back fail was while picking up a fully loaded Octane on my own. Ok, maybe not so funny. And yet ... A few years later the company reached for me to help disposing of them securely. Removing the disks and sending the rest into electronic disposal containers, that sort of thing. It's nice to see a revival of interest for these machines under the retro moniker. But at the time, no one cared. Asked around wondering if anyone was interested in taking some, including an Indy model I found out unused for years in a storage room. Was even willing to wipe the disks and let them go with the machines. There were no takers.
Oh the the that could be had with /dev we used to play random sound samples out of one of my colleagues speakers as he would always have them turned up fairly loud.
Thanks for the video and narration. Enjoyed it a lot.
Had been interested in seeing Flame in Acton on the Octane, but maybe that's on a different video. Good to hear SGIs story in any event.
There is a bit of flame, importing video. I did start to caputre some footage of editing footage with flame, however I realised watching other poeple edit footage is suprising dull. So it did not make it into the video.
So much memory. My dream machine was a SGI workstation. $30000 was a big number and I settled for a 486. I remember all the reports about T2 CGI.
Thoroughly enjoyed that. I dreamt of owning one when I was at Uni doing VR in the early 90s, might have a quick little peak on ebay ;-)
I managed nearly 40 of SGIs in the 90th and half of 2000th. As already said here, Irix was brilliant. Hated when I had to work with the primitive Linux. Today it's all Windows, my boss though speaks fluent Linux. Gave away an Origin 200 double chassis system with a Cray link to some students and some Octane and O2s with R10000 processors too. I just couldn't ship them to recycling.......
how would this computer compare to a computer now adays, like a i5 or something?
@@fsflip3111 it would not even come close lmao. I think one of the earlier super computers in the 90s is out paced by some computers today lmao. The super computer ntel Paragon XP/S 140 was only 143.40 GFLOPS A current gen processor like the i7 9700 is 43 by itself lmao. And the GTX 1080 is 8,000 gflops. The new 3080's are 30 tflops, as in teraflops. So we are SO far a head of even 90s super computers in our current desktops. Even some super computers from the early 2000s, lol
@@OnceShy_TwiceBitten Only if you knew what you are talking about. 16bit, 32bit, 64bit, number of cores, memory, and on board chip cache
super interesting content, thoroughly enjoyed this video.
This brought me back to the Origin of my career: supporting CAD environments running SGI, HP, and SUN workstations. There was the odd AIX box too, but don’t want to dwell on that. They were fun to work on and fun to learn. I still have an O2 I use as a prop on a bookshelf. Good times. Thanks for the video.
I was happy to see that Sun A5000 array. I used to have two of those hooked to my Compaq 6500r. The power consumption and heat generated was unbelievable.
I recall the massive cube used to emulate the N64 at the games company I worked for. Not long after that many of the artists switched to 3d games and got SGIs.
Glad you mentioned the open gl graphics standard at the end I was going to mention that. Awesome video about an important era of tech history! 😎
Silicon Graphics was a byword for unimaginable image processing power. Thanks for going under the hood, now I'm wondering about the 3D-graphics and rendering it could do.
Voodoo card levels, Open GL, Maya on Irix, that was was in 1990!
The final nail in the coffin for most of the traditional UNIX vendors, including sgi, was the introduction of the AMD Opteron. That thing made insane waves, bringing 64bit computing and support for tons and tons of RAM to the x86 platform. Combine that with Linux, and the traditional vendors simply couldn't compete anymore. In just a few short years, Opteron machines running Linux took over their last bastion, the super computer space. And somewhat ironically, Cray was one of the first vendors to fully embrace that paradigm shift.
I remember hanging my first Opteron rackmount boxes, being able to decommission a huge number of 32 bit systems in the process. They were so much faster than the Intel units, especially for the price.
it was earlier, pentium pro just beat SGI senseless.
@Karl with a K what?
They are talking about the Server space not some random office PCs.
@@cnr_0778 You talk with a guy who literally in his written username must embrace that he is written a certain way... don't expect from him that he knows anything about servers.
And yes, the OP is most obviously right. Imagine a super computer of 2022 with only 2 GB per CPU - that would be a joke nowadays, when already small workstations can have up to 2 TB of RAM.
I remember benchmarking an early Opteron machine against a top of the line Intel server from Dell and a SPARC based machine. The Opteron outperformed the others in every area and was the cheapest option too. It was a Sun branded machine, but their first generation Opteron models were actually rebranded kit from another manufacturer.
We also compared Solaris and Linux on the machine, expecting Linux to outperform the x86 version of Solaris, and were surprised that "Slowaris" was way faster and scaled up better!
Unexpectedly great quality from a smaller channel! I'd like to see a more in depth video of what and how can be made with this machine, maybe like a small scene or a 3D model
I used to run an SGI reseller in ‘99. I heard about one company where everybody had one on their desktop, like in that movie. Those were used as a render farm while also functioning as regular mail and web clients. I liked their 3D CRT displays with the glasses.
Just found this, thank you for the freedom unit conversions for us on the other side of the pond.
It's one of the computers I'd like to have in my collection. Not to really use it (apart from the eventual demo or just to tinker around) but for its incredible look.
It is a very impressive looking machine, its bigger than you would expect, that O2 is about the same size as a regular PC minitower.
I think I can probably get a dozen of these by the end of the week just have to go pick them up. Call any third party medical service organization that services mri scanners… they are bound to have a few of these collecting dust in the parts pool..though by now I suspect most of them ended up in the trash. Believe it or not there are still old GE mri scanners out there still using these things as the host computer… and they get paid the exact same amount per exams as a brand new mri scanner
I own one: Dual R14k with a V12, PCI card cage and 750W PSU that sounds like a jet engine.
I love SGI computers, I have a few in my collection: The Octane2, Indy R5000 (XL24), and an Indigo R4400 (Elan)
Always wanted but never got around to an O2 and Indigo 2 (the purple "Max Impact").
Of course my goal was ultimately an Infinite Reality Onyx. But alas I was never able to aquire one.
How can all that run on 750w? Must be some efficient tech for the time.
I have a purple indigo 2 on ebay right now :) working and boots to bios
@@itzjizmakig If that's yours for $695 it's tempting, I'll be watching it.
If yours is the one going for $3200...i wish you luck!
@@greyshadow9498 actually I lied lol I just have an o2 up right now but listing the indigo today I needed a video cable to test it bit it looks like perfect condition I guarantee it works and I'm testing an octane today too in great condition I prey they both boot up 🤞
SGI made such lovely clusters. Great kit, great support.
All good things...
We still use the octane and octane2 on GE Signa LX MRI systems. Great video! It was definitely the latest and greatest back in the day.
I remember wanting a Cray T3-E more than anything. I went to school for digital content creation in the late 90’s. Everything I learned was on an SGI. We were developing some really cool stuff on Virtuality and SGI gear. Too bad none of it ever came into being. It was a cool time to be alive. SGI had a style and persona that is unmatched in the computer industry today.
I enjoyed that video JB. Laughed out loud when you wheeled out the Sun A5200, I had one of them (from the time you also had some of our decom kit), couldn’t use it at home for more than an hour or so at a time under load due to the amount of heat! :-)
It really does warm my feet very effectively.
Absolutely well done!
This is stellar entertainment. Up there with the 8-bit guy. Thank you!
A remnant of SGI still exists as Graphics Properties Holdings Inc which is the name they adopted after selling off most of their assets in 2009. They don't do much these days though with the exception of some patent trolling back in 2012 when they sued Apple, Sony, and a bunch of other companies.
Its a shame whats left became a patent troll.
Wow I remember those. Had a great underwater screen saver. I bought a sparc 20 instead. And I've still got it somewhere along with that 50lb 21" crt monitor.
The only other time I’ve heard this background music from a viral video called Adams Orange Stand by Olde English Comedy. Thanks for taking me back to early 2000s, hadn’t watched their stuff in awhile.
Great video.
What a lovely channel you got here. Subbed :)