Reliving The Glory Days of SGI 386
devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""
Three degrees of seperation. (Score:5, Interesting)
Glad that there are opportunities for people to keep SGI going. I know I sure have looked at all of those eBay auctions at one time just to see what it was all about. At the current going price on some of the older hardware, I don't see what you have to lose.
SGI ROCKS IT (Score:0, Interesting)
Silicon Graphics® visual workstations from SGI are designed to address the high-performance requirements of scientific, engineering, and creative professionals. SGI leverages its expertise in supercomputing, system architectures, 3D graphics, software libraries, and operating-system development to offer increasingly advanced capabilities to its affordable desktop product line. Combined with our world-class software partners' applications, Silicon Graphics visual workstations offer levels of functionality unmatched by any other desktop systems. With their features, performance, and workflow capabilities, Silicon Graphics visual workstations help you take the lead in both the quality of the work you produce and the way you produce it.
I miss SGI (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw this article last week and enjoyed reading it, but at the end I was still left wondering "WHY?" I love old radios and stereo gear so I'm not unappreciative of the nostalgia aspect, but my linux desktop now is, in most ways, just as fulfilling as the old irix system I grew to love.
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop. In the end I'd rather have something gorgeously deco [eugenesargent.com] that I could keep around for years and upgrade as needed.
They should get back in and write off any loss (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the publicity SGI got from this end of the business helped the rest of their business. They'd probably disagree, at least at the point they got out of the business.
But via the publicity from this ariticle, /., and others talking, maybe SGI will re-think this. Heck any loss they get from low sales will be offset by the overall corporate business increase, I bet. It's worth the shot.
Support is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to get a more up-to-date version of Irix on it, but going from the 6.5.0 disks that I have to the most current releases is a pain. A big pain. A pain that makes the most b0rk3d RPM install look like a hot bath with a supermodel.
I don't want a full support contract from SGI - for a 150MHz machine that would be a total waste of time and money.
What I'd *love* would be a way to get a set of current disks for, say US$30, with the disclaimer "You are on your own. Don't call us, we won't call you."
I've been looking at putting Linux on it, just to have a bit more "support" on the machine. Now that the video subsystem is a bit better supported I may just do that.
Video better than $2000 Mac? (Score:3, Interesting)
When it comes to video, a $2,000 Mac still doesn't have the same capabilities as an SGI machine.
I thought Macs are known for their media handling capability. The fact that you can get one of those 10+ year old SGI machines for dirt cheap now and get better video editing is a bit shocking. Then again, the quote includes the word "capabilities", so perhaps that does not necessarily reflect performance/processing speed.
IRIS Workstation (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days?
I used an SGI Iris 24 bit color workstation with a 21" monitor back in 1990. I still get misty thinking about it. We used them for computational chemistry and visualization. Shading, transparency, GL had it all even back then. Coming as I did from a Vax 750 background, this was pretty amazing. The workstation came with a flight simulator to show off GL graphic power. These were beautiful machines, solid, well engineered. The aethetics have not been surpassed to this day. Sadly, some business guy tried to turn SGI into a PC company, and they alienated their devoted scientific and engineering users. Same thing happened to Sun except they sold out to corporate IT and big iron.
3 reasons why they will go down.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Still overpriced (Score:2, Interesting)
Make sure your monitor supports "sync on green" and an adapter will work. I had trouble with a Sun workstation and adapter with a KDS monitor because Sun uses composite sync and the PC monitor uses seperate H and V sync.
Anyway, last year I noticed SGI stuff going for bargain prices and since it had been a dream machine since 1992 I picked up an Indigo (teal) off ebay for $100, complete with a 19" monitor - shipping was $50, and then picked up a purple Indigo. It's a beautiful desktop with anime wallpaper, transparent aterm windows and is nice for working w/ blender stuff altho rendering jobs get sent to a newer machine.
Re:Support is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, IRIX while very powerful, can be troublesome. When I let the support contract run out on my O2, I had a video card go bad and damn!, it took me a whole day to replace the card and get IRIX to recognize things again. OS X is soooo much more plug and play. If you like *nix, give OS X a try.
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
As to Clusters killing the big server? Nope. IBM is selling a good number of there Z-machines and the I series also seems alive and kicking.
Clusters are great systems for some problems while while lots of cheap boxes are good for there problems line web front ends. For Databases an IBM Z-server running DB2 is killer. Uptime that would put the average BSD or Linux box to shame. They have hot swappable EVERYTHING!
There is an old saying when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. When all you know are pc boxs every problem looks like it can be solved by one or more PCs.
Re:No wonder why they go down... (Score:2, Interesting)
Because IBM and Sun still are making CPUs (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux and OS X killed SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
By 2001, my PIII/500+Voodoo 4+RH 7.3 was smoking the O2's. People with new Athlon+(GeForce||Radeon) systems were putting mine to shame. The new cheap-ass Dell workstations in the computer labs would have been better than the O2's at that point.
Spending that much money on hardware that is obsolete in less than 5 years is not a good investment.
The next year they switched to a Linux/MacOS X setup.
Anyone Remember the SGI Tractor Trailer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Inside was a collection of workstations all running very impressive (at the time) GL demos with realtime "twist this knob and rotate the champagne glass" kind of stuff.
We have at least three Origin 2000 systems, one is 96 node...so you know the demos must have helped at least some :)
If it wasn't for our Origins running Matlab I probably would not have tried linux until much later. The only reason I tried linux was to use X and run Matlab remotely.
Re:Video better than $2000 Mac? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the trouble with "generic" computers/OSs such as Mac and the PC -- they're aiming at doing everything, and accordingly, they cannot excel at any one thing like a specifically designed machine/OS can.
That said, Macs still spank PCs at video and typography, and PCs still spank Macs at games and.. I guess.. office. There's some specialization in the Mac and PC world, just not as balls-to-the-wall as SGI.
On a side note, I used to do texture mapping for the early incarnation of the Alice project ( www.alice3d.org, but back in '96 when it was still at UVa ). We used an SGI Reality Engine, and it made my hairs stand up it was so powerful. I remember once I crashed it -- by accidently pressing the middle button on the haxored broken mouse which was taped and labeled "Don't press me" -- and we had to go to the server room to reboot it. This was my first exposure to a *real* computer, and seeing that it was rebooted by turning a key blew my mind.
I have to say, though, that crashing a server by clicking the (admittedly broken) middle mouse button on a terminal is pretty appalling. Something was clearly Very Wrong in the setup.
Re:Great styling. (Score:2, Interesting)
My obligatory Apple-should-have-bought-SGI post (Score:3, Interesting)
Both companies had a solid niche in computer graphics; SGI's in 3D visualization, and Apple's in 2D design. Apple was going to introduce a UNIX based operation system, IRIX is a UNIX based operating system. Both companies are involved in computing, but not so much in the transactional data processing side that HP/IBM/Sun are involved in, and neither one was ever in the position to make meaningful moves in that market. Both had clientelle willing to spend more on their products than the products of their more direct competitors to get either their specialized hardware or software.
I think it would have benefitted Apple by giving their products more industrial/data center credibility, in addition to general upward mobility for hardware and software, especially in the 3D visualization realm. SGI on the other hand would have gotten access to more mainstream applications (in their late 90s heydey you COULD get stuff like Photoshop for the SGI) and easier integration with a desktop-priced computer.
In the end if it was done right, I think you could have had a really cool computing environment based on a common operation system. Research departments or other entities with uniqure requirements could have been "all Apple" with desktop Macs and machine-room servers all sharing the same user interface and capable of running the same applications (think fat binaries with MIPS and PPC, instead of PPC and 68K).
It might have led to some interesting clustering concepts integrating the desktops and the big boys for shared/distributed computing, NUMA, and other stuff.
Anyway, I think there was an interesting business case for such a merger. Most Apple fans (often rudely) disgree, and think of Apple as perpetually a personal computer/consumer electroncis company when I thought they could have been and done more. Oh well, it's too late now.
Re:Whatever Happened to SGI? John Walsh? (Score:2, Interesting)
I Used Many a SGI Machine and Saw The Fall Coming (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used the green boxed machines (their name escapes me), the Iris, the Indy, the O2, and a whole bunch of "oven" machines. All of them very nice to play with but all of which were very expensive. These where the guys who came up with IrisGL which was the forerunner to OpenGL. They went "64-bit" early too although they did it the wrong way (changing the OS moniker to "IRIX64" broke many Makefiles). All was right and good...as long as there was no one else in the same product space.
It was around the mid 90s when several new things started to pop up. Sun and HP noticed how SGI was a "darling" and wanted in on the action and tried to create their own "graphics workstation" both of which weren't as nice and often times a lot cheaper. Around this time, as well know, a little OS known as Linux started to get some steam and a little project known as Mesa started to actually conform to OpenGL.
So now they had pressure from the top and the bottom. I also viewed their buying Cray as a bad move because it didn't make their technology any cheaper to compete against Sun and HP let alone the cheap Windows or Linux workstation with a semi-decent AGP card.
The last SGI machine I saw ran Windows 2K. Such a shame because it was still way overpriced from what you could buy "off the shelf". Maybe things would have been different if they embraced Open Source to cut down the overhead. I honestly don't know. Retreating into the supercomputer product space made me notice how much they were the Amiga/Commedore of the 90s. They were too pretty, too expensive, too early.
Re:Great styling. (Score:4, Interesting)
How is SGI going to compete on their volume? not at all. Workstations just aren't a big enough market. They tried, remember the visual workstations (SGI, xeons + WinNT) I don't think there's anything they could have done. Lost cause.
I was there (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Because IBM and Sun still are making CPUs (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely. We had a Sun guy come and give us a demo of Solaris 10. I can't wait to play with dtrace, it looks absolutely amazing.
I wonder whether Linux will ever get something like it. We can hope! :)
Cheers,
Roger
1997 was the critical year in animation (Score:5, Interesting)
Then Microsoft bought Softimage, and made them come out with an NT version. The first serious OpenGL graphics cards (DirectX was stil in the future) came from vendors like Fujitsu and Dynamic Pictures. They didn't work very well. Installation required direct cooperation with the board developers. But they did have the 4x4 matrix multiplier for geometric transforms and a hardware Z buffer, just like an SGI machine.
That's when the studios started gettting NT-based animation systems. They weren't standard desktop PCs at first, though. Intergraph sold "high end NT workstations", and it was worth it simply because they could make the graphics board play nice with the motherboard. Softimage on NT on the DEC Alpha had a following.
One real issue for a few years was that it was seen as "unprofessional" to be using a PC for animation. At one point I had a Pentium Pro in a black rackmount case, and industry people asked me where they could get one like that, so their shop would look "professional".
Then came mainstream motherboards with AGP slots, and finally, the graphics board had enough memory bandwidth to work right. Then serious graphics boards went mainstream, and it was all downhill for Silicon Graphics after that.
It's called a Mac (Score:1, Interesting)
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
IBM seems to still sell POWER servers.
And as for *nix workstation, whaddya call a Mac used as a workstation?
Mac - largest installed *nix base
Mac - largest installed RISC base
Mac - thriving
Re:I was there (Score:5, Interesting)
Their suppot staff were highly trained degreed EEs who actually knew how the comuters worked down to the circuit level
I worked with SGIs from during the '88 - '92 timeframe. At that time, when you called with a problem, you didn't talk to the front-line page-turner monkey like you get now (you know, the guy looking in the same manual we have and saying 'Did you try x?' or 'Did you try y?'). We would actually talk to someone who could solve your problem. I can remember one time we had a problem with 'memmap' and actually talked to 3 people: the guy wrote the memmap function, the guy that wrote the memory device driver, and one other that, IIRC, wrote the semaphore functions.
Talked to all three. At once. Together.
We had a patch the next morning. Two or three weeks later, we got the official distribution.
SGI. How I miss thee...
Re:Jurassic Park (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in the day, SGI blew the crap outta any of the high end servers' IO performance available at the time. Sun servers sucked, HPs reeked, and so on.
We did our own storage support (pre RAID), and we got the cabinet sellers to paint the cabinets and disk trays in SGI blue and black.
We ended up purchasing more than a dozen Challenge L and XL servers and used them, even though the parent company balked.
That was over 6 years ago. I moved on to other jobs, and as luck would have it, I returned to the same position, but as a consultant.
The organization still has these bad boys in service, but will be decomissioning them because they've finally bought decent Sun systems with fibrechannel, and FDDI support is ending in the company soon. I'm the one to do shut 'em down.
Irix's inst program still rocks. Sun's pkgadd and OS install programs have a lot to learn about how to manage software on your systems (does Solaris 10 fixed all that??)
SGI really blew it from the marketing perspective. They had high performance servers that kicked ass, and they were never able to shed their image as a "graphics company".
When Oracle stopped supporting SGIs, I knew IRIX was doomed.
Re:It's not just SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
Companies used to buy high-priced workstations because they really got their money's worth in terms of differences with respect to 'commodity' PCs. PCs were of course more expensive, and reliability of hardware and software (Linux was immature/nonexistant depending on time period, Windows before W2k was too flaky to seriously consider a contender), and the performance was crappy. Professional workstations ran good, solid OSes, had clean system designs overall using quality components, and were frequently orders of magnitude more powerful, and not as many times expensive as they are today. For example, in 1996 the cutting edge commodity PCs could barely compete with 6 year old Sun workstations.
Now, the PC industry has a wider range (reliable system designs with quality components, all the way down to eMachines), is priced at bargain basement prices compared to a few years ago, and frequently delivers performance on the level or beyond expensive workstations, which have not come down in price much at all. Sun's seen the writing on the wall and thus we saw more and more PC hardware components used in their Ultra 5/10s, and now embracing more Opteron and Linux, and still not seeing as bright a light at the end of the tunnel. The only contender not showing much compromise is IBM with their Power servers and workstations, which have kept good pace performance wise with the PC market, but the quality/performance of the hardware has little to do with how they compete at their price point, and has most everything to do with delivering good service/support. Considered as standalone boxes without IBM's name/organization behind it, they are incredibly overpriced.
So why haven't professional workstation companies been able to continue to pump out the same difference in performance as they did 8 years ago? It's hard to justify any workstation on the market when overall the performance difference is neglible with commodity PCs, and there are vendors that provide good reliability (hot-swap for likely failure devices, good components all around) at 1/4th of the price of the comparable workstation?