I have a vivid memory of having to carry one of these up a flight of stairs.
I used the machine as an undergrad, doing some coding as part of the university's driving simulator project.
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]
#42I 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…
I spent a week at SGI UK in 1994. Everyone had at least an Indy workstation as their machine, even for secretarial purposes. But still there were a couple of 486 PCs acting as print servers.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#43Fun 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 probably sink perhaps 3-5 W with no extra heatsink. Compare this to modern systems, where the (single chip) chipset has a TDP of ~5 W, while the CPU(s) run anywhere from 50 to 100+ W.
So the gap between high-power and low-power components was way, way smaller back then, and I'd wager that a huge chunk of power in these SGI machines went into their high-speed bus systems.
Another big difference is how the power system was laid out. Here are the specs of a SGI Onyx 2 PSU [1]:
1750 W @ 230 V
3.45 V, 375 A
5 V, 85 A
12 V, 22 A
5 V, 1 A (probably standby power?)
Nowadays, a computer PSU provides essentially two voltages: 12 V and 5 V standby. It still provides "legacy" power, like 5 V and 3.3 V rails, but these are derived with simple buck-converters from the 12 V rail(s) in modern designs. Because a modern computer has few components requiring a lot of power, each of them has their own local converter sourced by 12 V to reduce losses.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170314114558/http://sgistuff.n... https://web.archive.org/web/20170314160011/http://sgistuff.n...
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#44Oh, who could forget the "not PS/2 connectors". I also vividly remember the sysadmin telling me to never ever disconnect they keyboard while the machine is running, or something inside might blow. Not sure if he was just paranoid, but I also never tried... I also remember one German shop buying a slightly used Onyx for half a million Deutsche Mark, and realizing they did not have the key for turning it on, so they had to short the thing. And it was so loud you had to wear earplugs...
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#45Great video! Not one for nostalgia but I have found myself cooing over old computers the way most react to babies. A BBC B can bring a tear to the eye. If you are in the UK then http://www.tnmoc.org/ is well worth a visit. Its like a themepark for nerds. Working at one of those noisy brutes must have been harsh. It brings back flashbacks of years spent in server rooms. Kids with their cloud computing don't know what…
I'm a member of TNMOC and go maybe 2-3 times a year. The Acorn machines RISC OS always fascinates me.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#46Man, this brings back memories. I still have an O2 and an Octane system in storage. Been meaning to take them out and set them up again at some point.
My father was generous enough to give me an O2 in the late 90s so I could learn 3D graphics, since I was interested in making special effects for movies. We didn’t have any software then but found this thing called Blender which was available for free and worked on IRIX. Still have a bunch of blender books and manuals from back then. Good times!
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#47Great video! Not one for nostalgia but I have found myself cooing over old computers the way most react to babies. A BBC B can bring a tear to the eye. If you are in the UK then http://www.tnmoc.org/ is well worth a visit. Its like a themepark for nerds. Working at one of those noisy brutes must have been harsh. It brings back flashbacks of years spent in server rooms. Kids with their cloud computing don't know what…
I'm a member of TNMOC and go maybe 2-3 times a year. The Acorn machines RISC OS always fascinates me.
Excellent idea, definitely something I want to support. I have just joined too.
I remember using an Archimedes after years of fighting to get my games to run well on a BBC Micro. Wow - it felt like cheating!
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#48Oh, who could forget the "not PS/2 connectors". I also vividly remember the sysadmin telling me to never ever disconnect they keyboard while the machine is running, or something inside might blow. Not sure if he was just paranoid, but I also never tried... I also remember one German shop buying a slightly used Onyx for half a million Deutsche Mark, and realizing they did not have the key for turning it on, so they ha…
Speaking of keyboards - I can't believe how well preserved the one in the video is. No discoloration or fading, as if it were made just last month.
Is it an SGI thing or was it just sitting in a box as a spare all this time?
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#49Oh, who could forget the "not PS/2 connectors". I also vividly remember the sysadmin telling me to never ever disconnect they keyboard while the machine is running, or something inside might blow. Not sure if he was just paranoid, but I also never tried... I also remember one German shop buying a slightly used Onyx for half a million Deutsche Mark, and realizing they did not have the key for turning it on, so they ha…
Early Macs didn't have hot-pluggable keyboards and mice either. It was one of those things where it would usually work, until one time some fluctuation would just brick the controller chip.