In grad school, I ended up borrowing an old teal Indigo2, with graphics upgrade, that my research group had sitting around, to use from my dorm room, mainly as a terminal.
(I owned almost nothing in the world at the time, not even a computer, having shed my possessions in a "Gattaca" kind of way, of not saving anything for the swim back from grad school. But an SGI Indigo2 is more than powerful enough to be an SSH terminal, and my electricity use wasn't metered. And, unlike the laptops I'd borrowed, no one would want the Indigo2 back.)
Getting IRIX installed involved multiple installation tapes (or was it CD-ROMs?) that some kind person in the lab happened to still have.
An admin later offered to give me this Indigo2 that I was borrowing, but they first needed me to bring it back in for inventory. Around then, I'd finally built (or was about to build) a Linux box, and hauling the Indigo2 and its huge CRT anywhere was a chore without a car, and I'd soon be graduating, and moving away lightly. So I carted the Indigo2 back across campus, and left it for good. Hopefully it ended up with someone who preserved it, as the author here does.
In the mid-90s our CS department got a lab full of Indys, which undergrads weren't allowed to use until their 3rd year because those were the serious kit. We could only imagine how cool it would be to have Indigo2s to play with.
In about 1998 a friend gave me a Casio PDA (E-15?). It was surplus because it wasn't great, and sluggish. CPU was a close relative of the on those Indy workstations used.
In 2002 I was working for a visual effects shop in the Bay Area. Among the chaos of wires, Wacom tablets and GeForce cards in the IT bay were two large stacks of Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. The ones with the MIPS R10k CPU and fancy graphics option. We complained when we had to move them because they were so heavy, and nobody could be bothered to take them to e-waste.
I used an Indy with X11 forwarding for a while, I could run a modern Firefox from my Linux machine, which worked nicely. As much as it looked like it was running natively, it really wasn't, so downloads would end up on the other computer, and sound would also play remotely.
Because I never throw anything away I still have a small bunch of these machines in the attic (apart from the Indigo they are all teal though) waiting for this kind of treatment, which have been super high on my to-do list.
Same for me circa 1993 in my uni a friend got a dumped vaxstation running Ultrix from the IT department, this was my first PC as I had no money at the time.
It had two stacked large PCB, the upper one was full of RAM chips totalling a whoping 8 MByte of RAM ;)
SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period. They were the desire of nearly every UNIX nerd back then.
I too have an O2 along with some SGI flat panel screens, which was amazing tech in the world of CRT displays of yesteryear.
I've been trying to donate this stuff to local museums for a while but sadly, none seem interested. The O2 still boots without any issues, and at least one of the screens work. Shame to just throw away.
I think the irony of this is the MIPS processors weren't that good for very long at all. (Famously Toy Story was rendered on SparcStations, even if the animation was prepared on SGIs). The PA-RISC ones seemed to have the most staying power, but many people don't view HP 9000 as sexy in the way SGI was.
PS2, as well. But games and game hardware tend to have very different CPU requirements than general purpose workstations.
The N64/PS1/PS2 (and others) weren’t exceptional for very long, if ever, in terms of CPU power. They relied on dedicated graphics hardware, low price, ease—of-use, a business model that allowed for selling the base hardware at a loss, and devs optimizing for a fixed platform to stay competitive for 5-10 years as PC hardware improved.
I seem to recall the CPU in the N64 was specced to be something like 75% of the performance of a Pentium 90 but for 20% of the price. The PS1 doesn't even have floating point. When the PS2 was released it felt like x86 was advancing faster than ever, so whatever impressive performance edge it had lasted for about five minutes.
In all cases it's hard to argue that MIPS devices were sold on the strength of their CPUs from the mid 90s onwards.
Not really, no. The memory system and graphics systems are completely different, and the CPU is a different MIPS processor to one in any SGI desktop. Some devkits did involve having whole subsystems on expansions in Indys though.
It should say something that when the Indy was announced the quip was "It's an Indigo without the go" so even had the N64 been Indy based it would not have been noted for CPU performance.
Really liked your post, the way you brought that old Indigo back to life was super fun to read. I totally agree that the magic is in seeing the machine actually run again, not just sitting on a shelf.
For me, I’ve messed with a couple of old PCs before, but nothing as cool as an SGI box. Reading this makes me think I should try grabbing one if I ever spot it cheap.
Thanks for sharing the journey—would love to see more pics of the messy steps too, not just the polished result. Feels like hanging out with a fellow retro nerd.
In the article you mentioned the Indy having a T1 interface. I only remembered having ISDN as an option on them, with the use case being that ISDN was pretty easily orderable for people working from home or branch offices and needing to get online with it. T1s were still exotic, expensive and not available in a lot of places. Do you have a T1 card for an Indy? I'd love to see that! Do you know what the intention of that was?
I worked vfx on teal Indigo2 at the time and then max impact purple one.. later on Octane, Octane2, etc.
BUT, this second generation of SGIs felt special. Ok a third gen, but the first one in beige boxes does not count. Crimson in gen before was also special.
Years later I was given a machine I worked on, since I'm in retro machines and game and all and to my disappointment it was the purple one, not teal (teal got lost somewhere). Now, imagine that since purple one is vastly superior to teal one, hah. Got indy along with it, webcam and all to be web ready!
I only skimmed through article for now, but is there a specific reason you haven't went with period-correct IRIX 5.x and went with 6? On a side note, SD2SCSI or similar to get rid of the spinning rust? And ultimate question, what do we all do with power supplies? They will die.
(author) Just because I'm used to 6.5, no other reason particularly. Any of the SCSI emulators are generally fine but I now gravitate to the ones that let you run multiple devices from image files because that makes it very easy to do backups. Here I used a ZuluSCSI, which is also one of the ones where if you have an existing drive, it will clone it for you in initiator mode.
The power supplies are a bigger question, but some work has been done on this already with other systems, notably the Fuel. There is at least a way to repair the Impact supplies' caps, though that's not all that can go wrong. I expect we'll eventually see conversion kits for these other big systems at some stage.
Ah, brings back memories of being a Silicon Graphics Customer Support Engineer based in London and the Home Counties, back in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Indy, Indigo, then later the Octanes, and others I can't quite remember the name of off-hand.
The video post-production companies in SOHO - I saw the CGI being rendered for Event Horizon...
The "IBM Stiction Problem" as it was called. Batches of IBM hard drives that worked fine for months - right up until the machines were powered off - which then entailed an on-site visit. The stifled gasp from the customer as I remove the old drive and give it a stern tap on the desk, to get it unstuck so I could clone it to the replacement. ;)
Enjoyed that job immensely, except for the driving around London bit.
Quite interesting read, like many on those days, I really looked up for SGI, and visited regularly their site due to them being the host for original C++ STL documentation.
Dunno. I worked (fortunately only) very briefly on one (Octane I _think_). Still remember the trashcan were flames shot out, when one was dragging a file on it. Cute the first three times. Other than that, I remember the bad flicker (in Europe 50Hz only!) of the (large, then) colour monitor and the noise. Oh, the noise. Fellow users tried to mitigate it by hiding it behind the door to the server room to little effect. I'm sure it's performance as graphics workstation were outstanding (which I had no use for then), but the ergonomics were just awful.
Have you used CRT monitors? Some of those could do over 120 Hz. Anything below 85 Hz was painful to look at for a longer period of time for most people.
Most beat it, e. g. the aesthetically much superior UI of the Canon Cat, which one can admire on the same website. Aside from that, many SGI computer cases look tacky, sort of like the N64 of the computer world; they also remind me a bit of Colani's case designs. Well, at least the guts were/are impressive.
I fucking love beige! Besides, there were many non-beige PCs on the market, especially outside of the US. And no SGI workstation ever had the coolness factor of something like the all-black, pyramid-styled Meadata Systems/Technologies "Snofru" 386 workstation from 1989 (which might've been just a Tradeshow Special).
Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine. Among workstations SGI was light years ahead - the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
> Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine.
Equation (as opposed to comparison) and preference are two very different things, friend. And yes, I'm one of those weirdos who prefers minimal, low-color, high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs and TUIs to, say, SGIs offerings. Like the Canon Cat's and many others. We'll both live.
> [...] the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
The GUI is not as grotten ugly to me as those from most modern offerings, or certain vintage offenders, e. g. early-to-mid Workbench, Windows XP (excluding the Classic Theme), I'll give you that. But it certainly doesn't knock me out of my socks.
> The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.
The criticism, "implications" (i. e. your speculations) aside, is that based on the screenshots of the desktop I've seen it's just not enough for me. Not even close.
But since I've never used an SGI workstation, I am indeed largely ignorant of its "hidden" UI/UX qualities. And who knows? Maybe you can pimp the desktop's visual design enough that even I fall in love with it.
> Your claims are IRIX is not "high res" and not "angular/facetted", both of which are objectively ludicrous, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
The only thing that is objectively ludicrous here is your substandard reading comprehension. I claimed that I have a (strong) preference for the all the UI attributes I mentioned in my post (and not just the ones you cherry-picked), which therefore, based on the various screenshots of SGI desktops I've seen, translates to me not being so hot and bothered about these very desktops as you are. I suggest you get over it and invest in some evidently much needed English-language remedial classes.
You can use it as an SSH terminal. :)
In grad school, I ended up borrowing an old teal Indigo2, with graphics upgrade, that my research group had sitting around, to use from my dorm room, mainly as a terminal.
(I owned almost nothing in the world at the time, not even a computer, having shed my possessions in a "Gattaca" kind of way, of not saving anything for the swim back from grad school. But an SGI Indigo2 is more than powerful enough to be an SSH terminal, and my electricity use wasn't metered. And, unlike the laptops I'd borrowed, no one would want the Indigo2 back.)
Getting IRIX installed involved multiple installation tapes (or was it CD-ROMs?) that some kind person in the lab happened to still have.
An admin later offered to give me this Indigo2 that I was borrowing, but they first needed me to bring it back in for inventory. Around then, I'd finally built (or was about to build) a Linux box, and hauling the Indigo2 and its huge CRT anywhere was a chore without a car, and I'd soon be graduating, and moving away lightly. So I carted the Indigo2 back across campus, and left it for good. Hopefully it ended up with someone who preserved it, as the author here does.
In the mid-90s our CS department got a lab full of Indys, which undergrads weren't allowed to use until their 3rd year because those were the serious kit. We could only imagine how cool it would be to have Indigo2s to play with.
In about 1998 a friend gave me a Casio PDA (E-15?). It was surplus because it wasn't great, and sluggish. CPU was a close relative of the on those Indy workstations used.
In 2002 I was working for a visual effects shop in the Bay Area. Among the chaos of wires, Wacom tablets and GeForce cards in the IT bay were two large stacks of Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. The ones with the MIPS R10k CPU and fancy graphics option. We complained when we had to move them because they were so heavy, and nobody could be bothered to take them to e-waste.
I used an Indy with X11 forwarding for a while, I could run a modern Firefox from my Linux machine, which worked nicely. As much as it looked like it was running natively, it really wasn't, so downloads would end up on the other computer, and sound would also play remotely. Because I never throw anything away I still have a small bunch of these machines in the attic (apart from the Indigo they are all teal though) waiting for this kind of treatment, which have been super high on my to-do list.
Same for me circa 1993 in my uni a friend got a dumped vaxstation running Ultrix from the IT department, this was my first PC as I had no money at the time.
It had two stacked large PCB, the upper one was full of RAM chips totalling a whoping 8 MByte of RAM ;)
SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period. They were the desire of nearly every UNIX nerd back then.
Remember "Erwin", the SGI O2 in the userfriendly.org comic? https://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1065/737/1600/user%20fri...
The comic is now dead, but it had a long and amazing run.
I still keep an SGI O2, Octane, and Fuel around for nostalgia hits nowadays, and they never disappoint:
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel_Blen...
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg
I too have an O2 along with some SGI flat panel screens, which was amazing tech in the world of CRT displays of yesteryear.
I've been trying to donate this stuff to local museums for a while but sadly, none seem interested. The O2 still boots without any issues, and at least one of the screens work. Shame to just throw away.
I think the irony of this is the MIPS processors weren't that good for very long at all. (Famously Toy Story was rendered on SparcStations, even if the animation was prepared on SGIs). The PA-RISC ones seemed to have the most staying power, but many people don't view HP 9000 as sexy in the way SGI was.
On the other side, turns out both Playstation (1) and Nintendo 64 did quite well for quite long.
PS2, as well. But games and game hardware tend to have very different CPU requirements than general purpose workstations.
The N64/PS1/PS2 (and others) weren’t exceptional for very long, if ever, in terms of CPU power. They relied on dedicated graphics hardware, low price, ease—of-use, a business model that allowed for selling the base hardware at a loss, and devs optimizing for a fixed platform to stay competitive for 5-10 years as PC hardware improved.
I seem to recall the CPU in the N64 was specced to be something like 75% of the performance of a Pentium 90 but for 20% of the price. The PS1 doesn't even have floating point. When the PS2 was released it felt like x86 was advancing faster than ever, so whatever impressive performance edge it had lasted for about five minutes.
In all cases it's hard to argue that MIPS devices were sold on the strength of their CPUs from the mid 90s onwards.
N64 was effectively Indy, but priced into a game console. Its devkit was an Indy (at first) even.
> N64 was effectively Indy
Not really, no. The memory system and graphics systems are completely different, and the CPU is a different MIPS processor to one in any SGI desktop. Some devkits did involve having whole subsystems on expansions in Indys though.
It should say something that when the Indy was announced the quip was "It's an Indigo without the go" so even had the N64 been Indy based it would not have been noted for CPU performance.
Irix remains the best looking OS imo.
Really liked your post, the way you brought that old Indigo back to life was super fun to read. I totally agree that the magic is in seeing the machine actually run again, not just sitting on a shelf. For me, I’ve messed with a couple of old PCs before, but nothing as cool as an SGI box. Reading this makes me think I should try grabbing one if I ever spot it cheap. Thanks for sharing the journey—would love to see more pics of the messy steps too, not just the polished result. Feels like hanging out with a fellow retro nerd.
Author here - thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed it.
In the article you mentioned the Indy having a T1 interface. I only remembered having ISDN as an option on them, with the use case being that ISDN was pretty easily orderable for people working from home or branch offices and needing to get online with it. T1s were still exotic, expensive and not available in a lot of places. Do you have a T1 card for an Indy? I'd love to see that! Do you know what the intention of that was?
No, no, I had a thinko when I wrote that. The Indy had a ISDN port. Thanks for spotting the error.
TIL "thinko". Thank you.
I worked vfx on teal Indigo2 at the time and then max impact purple one.. later on Octane, Octane2, etc.
BUT, this second generation of SGIs felt special. Ok a third gen, but the first one in beige boxes does not count. Crimson in gen before was also special.
Years later I was given a machine I worked on, since I'm in retro machines and game and all and to my disappointment it was the purple one, not teal (teal got lost somewhere). Now, imagine that since purple one is vastly superior to teal one, hah. Got indy along with it, webcam and all to be web ready!
I only skimmed through article for now, but is there a specific reason you haven't went with period-correct IRIX 5.x and went with 6? On a side note, SD2SCSI or similar to get rid of the spinning rust? And ultimate question, what do we all do with power supplies? They will die.
(author) Just because I'm used to 6.5, no other reason particularly. Any of the SCSI emulators are generally fine but I now gravitate to the ones that let you run multiple devices from image files because that makes it very easy to do backups. Here I used a ZuluSCSI, which is also one of the ones where if you have an existing drive, it will clone it for you in initiator mode.
The power supplies are a bigger question, but some work has been done on this already with other systems, notably the Fuel. There is at least a way to repair the Impact supplies' caps, though that's not all that can go wrong. I expect we'll eventually see conversion kits for these other big systems at some stage.
Ah, brings back memories of being a Silicon Graphics Customer Support Engineer based in London and the Home Counties, back in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Indy, Indigo, then later the Octanes, and others I can't quite remember the name of off-hand.
The video post-production companies in SOHO - I saw the CGI being rendered for Event Horizon...
The "IBM Stiction Problem" as it was called. Batches of IBM hard drives that worked fine for months - right up until the machines were powered off - which then entailed an on-site visit. The stifled gasp from the customer as I remove the old drive and give it a stern tap on the desk, to get it unstuck so I could clone it to the replacement. ;)
Enjoyed that job immensely, except for the driving around London bit.
It runs Doom ==> system qualified.
Quite interesting read, like many on those days, I really looked up for SGI, and visited regularly their site due to them being the host for original C++ STL documentation.
Interesting to see an old Unix box with EISA slots .. I would have thought that was "too PC".
Nothing beats the SGI desktop.
Dunno. I worked (fortunately only) very briefly on one (Octane I _think_). Still remember the trashcan were flames shot out, when one was dragging a file on it. Cute the first three times. Other than that, I remember the bad flicker (in Europe 50Hz only!) of the (large, then) colour monitor and the noise. Oh, the noise. Fellow users tried to mitigate it by hiding it behind the door to the server room to little effect. I'm sure it's performance as graphics workstation were outstanding (which I had no use for then), but the ergonomics were just awful.
what do you mean “60Hz only”, I don’t recall touching anything before 2012 that had higher refresh rates in an office.
Heck, even now most business equipment (even the art calibrated ones) are 60Hz…
Have you used CRT monitors? Some of those could do over 120 Hz. Anything below 85 Hz was painful to look at for a longer period of time for most people.
Most beat it, e. g. the aesthetically much superior UI of the Canon Cat, which one can admire on the same website. Aside from that, many SGI computer cases look tacky, sort of like the N64 of the computer world; they also remind me a bit of Colani's case designs. Well, at least the guts were/are impressive.
Weird comment. They stood out positively in a world where literally everything was beige.
I fucking love beige! Besides, there were many non-beige PCs on the market, especially outside of the US. And no SGI workstation ever had the coolness factor of something like the all-black, pyramid-styled Meadata Systems/Technologies "Snofru" 386 workstation from 1989 (which might've been just a Tradeshow Special).
Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine. Among workstations SGI was light years ahead - the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
> Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine.
Equation (as opposed to comparison) and preference are two very different things, friend. And yes, I'm one of those weirdos who prefers minimal, low-color, high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs and TUIs to, say, SGIs offerings. Like the Canon Cat's and many others. We'll both live.
> [...] the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
The GUI is not as grotten ugly to me as those from most modern offerings, or certain vintage offenders, e. g. early-to-mid Workbench, Windows XP (excluding the Classic Theme), I'll give you that. But it certainly doesn't knock me out of my socks.
> high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs
The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.
> The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.
The criticism, "implications" (i. e. your speculations) aside, is that based on the screenshots of the desktop I've seen it's just not enough for me. Not even close.
But since I've never used an SGI workstation, I am indeed largely ignorant of its "hidden" UI/UX qualities. And who knows? Maybe you can pimp the desktop's visual design enough that even I fall in love with it.
Your claims are IRIX is not "high res" and not "angular/facetted", both of which are objectively ludicrous, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
> But since I've never used an SGI workstation
Evidently.
> Your claims are IRIX is not "high res" and not "angular/facetted", both of which are objectively ludicrous, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
The only thing that is objectively ludicrous here is your substandard reading comprehension. I claimed that I have a (strong) preference for the all the UI attributes I mentioned in my post (and not just the ones you cherry-picked), which therefore, based on the various screenshots of SGI desktops I've seen, translates to me not being so hot and bothered about these very desktops as you are. I suggest you get over it and invest in some evidently much needed English-language remedial classes.
> I suggest you get over it and invest in some evidently much needed English-language remedial classes.
So you're just a contrarian troll.
Their cases were designed in those days. Today all computers look the same.
I mean the desktop on the monitor screen. Not the case.
Incredible labor of love, well done! It’s also a fun machine to play with OpenGL.
Will always have a soft spot for Indigo2 10k.