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

I haven't thought about the binders in ages. There was nobody in my department who knew much about the SGI machines and my only tutor was those binders. Looking back I wonder how I accomplished anything at all.

Always loved the IRIX Motif and 4dwm aesthetics, and was lucky to have had access to some Indigo machine in school.

Was really impressed by how responsive the file manager was wrt. the immediate appearance of icons for files created from terminal. It also kept track of which folders were open in other windows, giving them different appearance - felt like one was interacting with actual objects.

Tried numerous times to get the same feel on Linux; there used to be a project called 5dwm to recreate the Indigo Magic Desktop experience, I should check if it is still around for additional kick of nostalgia...

At one point our lab bought an O2 and an Indigo. Mostly these were fashion statements as we didn't do much graphics work. I can't remember them being remarkable performance wise for normal workloads compared to the Sun machines that where our staple.

The machines most certainly stood out in a time where the only options you got for an exterior finish were beige and beige.

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 lying. Of course, a year later the 3DFX Voodoo 1 would come out and deliver approximately 1/4 the fill rate for 1/1000 the price.

Besides that, it was a fine machine. Lots of cores that I didn’t know how to utilize. Occasional bugs in the OpenGL implementation that might have been me accidentally triggering edge cases. Command line compiles, gdb, lots of core dumps.

SGI really lost it’s way after this. Years later they would be showing at SIGGRAPH with multi-wall-sized displays, but without the programmable shading that would be all the rage not just right then, but for the next two decades... They went so far as to publish papers showing that with hundreds of passes and temporary buffers using fixed-function shading, you could eventually get mostly the same results as the new-fangled programmable BS...

The brilliant engineers of SGI soon moved on to become founding members of Nvidia, ATI, Imagination and other graphics tech companies.

We had one of these in Bryan Jones' laboratory in the Chemistry Department at the University of Toronto. We also had the 3D polarized shutter-based glasses as well - it was cool to see small molecules docking into active sites of enzymes right in front of your face. Of course, none of that stuff amounted to anything, and in hindsight it was a gigantic waste of money.

In my lab, we only had one of the SGI Indy machines - it was fun surfing the web on the original NCSA Mosaic browser on that pizza box machine.