Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 146 posts

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#11

Post by qaq »

monocasa wrote: post #10
qaq wrote: post #3

Could be converted to a cool mini-fridge

It still runs. Let's keep the fridges to "for parts" ebay purchases for computers that combo of old and interesting.

I was not suggesting this particular system.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#13

Post by ChuckMcM »

Fun times. Could have been the envy of all your engineer buddies with one of those bad boys all to yourself. What a difference 25 years makes.

Personally I find that learning about these machines is a good way to better understand computer architecture because each one was, during its reign, some really smart bunch of peoples idea of what was state of the art. You can see the evolution of ideas that way.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#15

Post by Keyframe »

I had the pleasure to work with various SGI machines back then (video and animation). Being around Onyx was always a special feeling, even though I prefered thw look of older Crimson chassis. SGI made a poster calendar even, which was set like 40 odd years into the future or something, taking advanfage of periodicity of calendar years. Nice gimmick, nice poster which I lost, sadly.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#16

Post by yaakov34 »

danieltillett wrote: post #2

I had the fun of using this system when I was doing my undergraduate thesis. I had done some protein modelling work and ran straight into the problem that there was no way to get the beautiful models into my thesis - we had no printer. I came up with what I thought was the genius idea of photographing the monitor, the problem was the CRT screen was so curved my models were all distorted. I ended up wheeling the whole…

These early SGI machines did not have good support for printing. Even if you did have a printer, the only way to print was to take a screenshot, which had much lower resolution than laser printers and did not look good.

My first paid job - this was after the 10th grade in high school - was writing a kind of printer driver for one of these machines. One of the researchers at a local university had the same problem you did, and heard about this kid who was supposed to be good with computers :)

The SGI GL manuals (this was before it became OpenGL) included all the mathematical formulas they used to display the graphics - the rotation and perspective matrices to transform the coordinates, the vector cross products to calculate shading, and so on. I took these and implemented a subset of GL which outputted PostScript commands to a text file. This was then sent straight to a laser printer (Apple, I think). I didn't implement everything that SGI did, of course - no smooth shading and I think I could handle only the simplest types of occlusion. But it was good enough to handle the models that the researchers needed to print.

I still remember the SGI manuals in big 3 ring binders. This is what I learned linear algebra from - thanks guys.

Post reply on HN