sgi - retro video on their hardware and software

[OVERKILL]

When I was in school, I was lucky enough to be able to have access to a couple of sgi workstations. Their equipment was, in its heyday, insanely expensive (as explored in the video). Their OS was extremely good for the time though (IRIX) and they offered unrivalled performance in the video and 3D space during their prime.

Video:

 

[UncleDave]

At discreet logic we we ran all our apps on SGI's until 2006-7

That stuff walked all over everything in the day.

He talks about it at around 2:50- that was us.

 

[UncleDave]

We changed post production forever with these systems - this was the little one.

The Onyx IR and Onyx 2 were monster machines that really moved pixels.

At one point My partner and I owned about 15 of these complete "Flame" systems we rented and they were always busy.

 

[UncleDave]

These have become collectors Items....

Our product line was represented by these symbols.

The most popular and original product was " Flame" it was represented by the fish.....

 

[UncleDave]

Some discreet swag around the house.

We had the best marketing in the industry at the time - super edgy and hip - made the phone ring.

 

[UncleDave]

We would get complete breakdowns like this from clients - we demos this at NAB the year it came out.

We simply walked all over everyone with impunity.

 

[y_p_w]

Ah - SGI. Their burned bright and burned out rather quickly. I heard that buying MIPS was probably a mistake.

I do remember seeing a documentary on Pixar back in the day. They were still based in Point Richmond, California (near the Chevron Richmond Refinery) and they showed the racks of Sun workstations that they were using to render digital animation.

 

[OVERKILL]

We would get complete breakdowns like this from clients - we demos this at NAB the year it came out.

We simply walked all over everyone with impunity.

Impressive!

 

[OVERKILL]

Ah - SGI. Their burned bright and burned out rather quickly. I heard that buying MIPS was probably a mistake.

I do remember seeing a documentary on Pixar back in the day. They were still based in Point Richmond, California (near the Chevron Richmond Refinery) and they showed the racks of Sun workstations that they were using to render digital animation.

I'm not sure buying MIPS was a mistake, but buying CRAY was.

 

[UncleDave]

Ah - SGI. Their burned bright and burned out rather quickly. I heard that buying MIPS was probably a mistake.

I do remember seeing a documentary on Pixar back in the day. They were still based in Point Richmond, California (near the Chevron Richmond Refinery) and they showed the racks of Sun workstations that they were using to render digital animation.

81-2009 I think.

SGI's weren't super great 3D platforms for movie creation.
Pixar ran all kinds of pizza box server based stuff Alias/Maya, Softimage.

For a while these vendors ran on suns, but off the shelf boxes running cot GPU's were a better value proposition and ran away with 3d creation.

Where the SGI's excelled was being able to composite 3d models onto 2D images and being a " hero box" finishing up complex commercials and spots. Simply having a video I/O was a big deal, the fact that they were able to work in pretty much any resolution made them work for TV and Film pulling away from dedicated platforms like the Quantel Henry and Harry, or the magnificent Grass Valley Groups Kaleidoscope Kadenza suite and this let us sell to multiple markets and our clients take on any work that walked through the door.

From 95-when I left in 2011, myself and my teams sold over a billion dollars of software and hardware products.

Baluzzo tanked SGI and they made a series of really bad decisions.

MIPS were faster than their faceplates implied, but the SGI's really shone in the Graphics engine and their ability to scale speed and texture ram, and their incredible bus bandwidth that could keep everything connected without what states making the box really fluid under the pen.

Cray brought nothing to media, and apparently little to the rest of SGI.

 

[FishFry]

I'm in the film industry since over 30 years now - most of the time as a DP, but I still do a lot of postproduction, editing and color grading.
That brings back some sweet memories. I got a lot work done on the SGIs back in those days - Flame, Smoke, Softimage etc.
Good times.

Frank

 

[y_p_w]

I'm not sure buying MIPS was a mistake, but buying CRAY was.

I remember a classmate in my masters program who worked there. He said that their own design work was done on their own workstations, even though it was just as a Unix workflow. The major chip design EDA tool companies supported IRIX.

But these days commodity Linux servers do the heavy lifting. All I would need is a way to remote access the server. Even on-site work was done using remote access software.

 

[bunnspecial]

I have an Indigo and an Octane sitting in storage. They came from a previous job where I’d saved them from the dumpster. When I left in 2020, they said if I didn’t take them they’d end up in the dumpster again. I never got the Indigo going as I didn’t have a keyboard or mouse and they are proprietary(and impossible to find). It needs a drive also, which isn’t insurmountable but I don’t want to rob a 1gb+ 50 pin SCSI from one of my Macs and the 50 to 68 adapters are flakey in my experience.

The Octane, though, worked perfectly with some software on it(scientific stuff for protein modeling from NMR). I have a 13w3 Trinitron to match it plus the SGI keyboard and mouse, even though they are PS2

 

[y_p_w]

The Octane, though, worked perfectly with some software on it(scientific stuff for protein modeling from NMR). I have a 13w3 Trinitron to match it plus the SGI keyboard and mouse, even though they are PS2

Those were definitely fun (read a huge PITA). I remember working with Sun workstations where that was the standard video output. When my CRT monitor started dying, we had our contracted IT to come over to our small office (kind of hard to explain the deal with IT) with a replacement, and the guy even brought an extra. He said he welcomed the opportunity to drive out, since we were maybe 40 miles away. But for a while my manager let me borrow his, which was a Sun monitor that could be switched with VGA, where he used the same monitor for his PC by using the switch.

I think there were some DB13W3 to VGA converters, and we were talking about maybe using one. I don't know why, but we were still using my Sun Ultra 60 Creator 3D until maybe 2009. It didn't make much sense after a while other than all our chip design EDA tools were with a SunOS license, but we could have changed that at any time. We started using a commodity Linux machine as a server, and one that wasn't even all that powerful. It blew the doors off the Sun. Probably because the Sun was more than a decade old. My machine might have had a floppy but I never used it.

 

[fat biker]

I worked on that product line, power supplies.
They were really complex because they were also responible for cooling air flow. Compounded by several hardware configurations.
SGI's downfall was buying Cray Computers.

fat biker