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

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

#111

Post by analbeads01 »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #64
corysama wrote: post #28

I was very fortunate. This is the machine on which I originally learned OpenGL. It was an undergrad lab job where I was paid $5/hour to eventually write http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp But, in order to do that I had to learn how to 3D at all. The most fun I had with the machine was playing GlQuake 1 at 1280x1024 on a T1 line and bragging about it on the chat where everyone thought I was l…

If you mean in 1993, you mean GL, not openGL, I think. I worked at SGI in 1992.

OpenGL was founded in 92 and basically IrisGL with bits removed. Anyway by the time quake was released in 1996 OpenGL was very much a thing.

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

#112

Post by blincoln »

In the mid-90s, a friend of mine described an SGI demo where the player flew a speederbike through a forest. Apparently it was quite impressive for the time. Every time I come across footage of old SGI software, I hope it's in there, but it never is. Has anyone run across a video of this?

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

#113

Post by gdubs »

When I was about 13 years old I had my mom call up SGI to ask if they could send us any information. This was the time of dialup internet / AOL, and info came to our house primarily via snail-mail. A few weeks later a thick package came in the mail, full of beautifully printed brochures and booklets on their machines of the day; Indigo, Indy, Onyx... I treasured those pamphlets, and dreamed of maybe one day getting to actually use an SGI.

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

#114

Post by ebikelaw »

blattimwind wrote: post #43
ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

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.

What I think is quite interesting about these era of machines is where the power goes. First off, there aren't actually many heatsinks in the machine, and those few that are used, are really tiny. This means that the power used must be distributed rather evenly among all components, even on the CPU boards. The CPUs can at most pull 10-15 W with those heatsinks, meanwhile the big ASICs spread around everywhere can pro…

When Intel released the Pentium with mandatory active heatsinks that was called a big scandal by the industry magazines. Now of course we have smaller CPUs drawing 150W or more.

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

#115

Post by a-dub »

I had an Indy on my desk when I was in my first paid job in high school. I loved that thing. We also had a Challenge named challenger. I blew it up once.

Years later I interviewed at Google. One of my interviewers turned out to be one of Jim Clark's original grad students. That was pretty crazy.

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

#116

Post by qaq »

octorian wrote: post #82
qaq wrote: post #3

Could be converted to a cool mini-fridge

Let's please stop doing that to interesting vintage computers. Well, at least to working (or fixable) ones. I cringe every time someone shows off that sort of project.

While I was not suggesting doing to this particular model I would imagine a good chunk of them end up in a landfill.

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

#117

Post by rasz »

dev_dull wrote: post #87

The scanlines on the CRT monitor reminded me how good the refresh rates were on that hardware back then. How did we move backwards so spectacularly with LCD panels? It’s only now that reasonably priced 144hz monitors are hitting the market.

What good would high refresh LCD do you in 1995-2005? From no acceleration at all to barely being able to run modern games at 40 fps (cod2 on 7800GTX in 2005).

CRT need high refresh, because they flash picture content at you. LCD do not flash, they maintain steady picture.

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

#119

Post by rasz »

pcurve wrote: post #71

can you imagine companies spending on insane amount of money on these only to have them become obsolete in 3 years?

No, because it didnt happen, commodity hardware got there ~7 years later. You were buying a window into the future, allowing your researchers to do things mere mortals could only read about in science fiction books.

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

#120

Post by mnutt »

My father worked in sales for sgi through most of the 90s; what started as him bringing me to the office a few times on weekends turned into me asking to go to the office most weekends. ("don't you have any work you need to finish up?")

Every employee had an an Indy or Indigo2 in their office and most (us included) had one at home too. Very few of the machines at the office had passwords. I never really got very far past playing with the 3d tech demos or surfing the web on Mosaic and Netscape, but it was a pretty formative part of my career in technology.

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