51–60 of 80 posts
It's a unix system! I know this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started my career at Oracle in 1994, and I still remember what a big deal it was when the Silicon Graphics (wasn’t officially SGI yet) “Magic Bus” would come and park in the Redwood Shores parking lot and we would all line up to go inside and see some of these demos. I felt at the time like I was really in the future.
Similar timing, I had a high school internship at the National Cancer Institute at Ft. Detrick, MD in 1994-95, and the lab down the hall had some SGI iron and a glove (I don't remember what the glove hardware was, if it was SGI or 3rd-party or custom) for manipulating 3D renders of folded proteins. Incredible stuff, same "in the future" feeling.
Really cool project, although it's too bad half the links are broken :( Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections. SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) ha…
Great times working at SGI back in the 1980s, lots of long hours, lots of fun inventing things that needed to be invented. Still miss the MIPS.
I had an Onyx back in the day, and I remember one of the demos being a photo of a lion or tiger, and clicking on the photo caused it to warp in three dimensions like a sheet of rubber. Does anyone remember this or am I hallucinating?
The first thing I noticed when seeing the SGI demos for the first time is that the menu UI is strikingly similar to the file select screen in Super Mario 64. Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder me…
My favourite demonstration of this is a comparison between The Secret Aquarium bonus stage [0] with one of the animations in The Mind's Eye [1] (technically this is from Symbolics rather than SGI, but 3D animators of the time were in metaphorical conversation with each other), but this is maybe the most explicit example of just how direct that connection was.
Spent many (un)happy hours in front of both SGI Indy and SGI O2 during my PhD... High point was definitely when we found out that if you telnetted to another box you could remotely play audio clips and the operator typically had no idea what was going on. Every single device ended up with a collection of Star Wars audio clips ... :)
Ahh... the required "guest" account with no password on it. In SGI tech support (East team '96, Unix team '97 - my Indigo was dewi.csd.sgi.com), it was the way we copied files around (the Troops had just come out) and also had a internal tool that would pop up a window on someone else's machine to get their attention (if they weren't directly paying attention to the multicast chat program...)
Spent many (un)happy hours in front of both SGI Indy and SGI O2 during my PhD... High point was definitely when we found out that if you telnetted to another box you could remotely play audio clips and the operator typically had no idea what was going on. Every single device ended up with a collection of Star Wars audio clips ... :)
WASM = fire up all the fans hard to believe that an SGI demo on modern hardware would require that much
Smooth, impressive