Meet the SGI Octane - A 3D Graphics Powerhouse from 1997

[@RMCRetro]

Thanks for watching and a special thanks to Kai who donated this machine. Did you use an Octane? Do you have examples or work to share? If so leave a comment I'd love to hear from you. If you enjoy my content and would like to show support for The Cave then here's how you can help: ● Support RMC on Patreon: www.patreon.com/RetroManCave ● Treat me to a Coffee with Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/retromancave ● Leave a tip on Paypal: paypal.me/RetroManCave Thank you! Neil - RMC

[@srfrg9707]

RetroManCave I worked on SGI workstations (mostly Indy and Indigo in the begining and O2, Octane etc. later) when I started my career as a 3D character animator with Softimage and Maya. I animated characters mainly for TV cartoons and commercials. Animators nicknamed the Octane "the toaster" not because of its shape but because of its tendency to overheat and crash whenever you forgot to save you work for more than 1 hour! This pushed one of the studio I was working for to move all the Octanes' and O2s' main units in the server's room. I am so jealous of your SGI version of Doom. If only we had a copy back then...

[@JesusisJesus]

Wow and Cool. I was involved in 24 track Audio recording & rendering in 2000ish with a Pentium 666 and I was the king of the studio with that beast and a MOTU on firewire. USB laughed at firewire shortly after that and CPU speeds followed Moores Law. I wonder how this thing would have crunched 24 Audio tracks at 48khz???? :)

[@Doobie3010]

Facinating machine,the case design is certainly of its time,most pc cases these days a dull,bland,white or black boxes.

[@Wazoox]

In 1998 I've conceived an realised the graphics displays for WorldCup 98 in France, using 3 octanes MXE on each stadium. Fortunately these were provided for free by SGI :) I've told of some of my adventures with these octanes on Quora here: www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-epic-computer-glitch-you-have-ever-seen/answer/Emmanuel-Florac

[@Wazoox]

@@JesusisJesus back in 97 Steinberg promised to release a version of their audio suite, but it never came out (thought the VST development kit for IRIX was available for a while). The Octane was much more capable to crunch many audio tracks than any PC of the time.

[@KarynRobertsUSA]

I'm ex SGI and still use mine daily - I have an Indy, Indigo2, Octane2, 320, Origin 2000 and 2100 Desksides - my Octane2 w/V12 is my daily driver. I was a Sysadmin 1995 to 1999'ish on the main campus, then towards the end in the 'now' Google complex - I'd be happy to share stories. Those years were the best times of my life - what an awesome place to work!

[@chrisernst68]

Its still your daily driver? With dual 600mhz cpu and 2gb of sdram? How is the experience in modern programs?

[@ferencszabo3504]

Wow, so IRIX is not foreign to you! How tedious was Unix back then?

[@pauldavis5665]

It was a powerhouse for its time, but today I can't imagine you could do much with it other than basic things like web browsing or playing old games. Any modern games or other modern applications would probably be sluggish or not work at all. Even low end computers today are more powerful than this.

[@ConsumerOfCringe]

@Xenomoly Bloom ipads are extremely powerful compared to other mobile devices such as surfaces and sub 1000 tablets. A wii u or rasberry pi 4 is more powerfull than most SGI machines.

[@lookoutforchris]

@@pauldavis5665 well run contemporaneous software on it. ProENGINEER WildFire or Flame runs on it as fast as it did when it was new and those are serious workhorse pieces of software still capable of commercial work.

[@3ffrige]

I remember a long time ago when I was still living in Hawaii, I used to work for Xerox doing field repair work on Xerox low to mid volume copy machines. Had a call from the call center to go over to a company in downtown Honolulu called Square Inc (Not Square Soft). When I went over there, the first thing I noticed that everyone working there was Japanese. And that office was just filled with these Octane workstations. Something I'll never forget; that traditional SGI design asthetic and that super bright power indicator line that underlined the Octane logo. They were working on some sort of Anime looking show. The designs of the characters were amazing! What were they working on? I asked my host questions on the many SGI displays I seen in the office. He just gave me a polite nod and grin and politely escorted me to the Xerox 5034 that I was there to repair. Then 5 years later while watching a movie with my friends did I then realize. . .Holy shit. . .I witnessed the first workings of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . . . at Square in downtown Honolulu . . . exclusively on SGI hardware.

[@florac.6784]

That seems so sick. Awesome!

[@malk6277]

Haha - I remember Square: when they were working on Final Fantasy, they were something of a dream gig to score because every artist liked the idea of gigging in Hawaii. I had just arrived in LA and was learning the ropes: it was too early in my career to have a chance in hell of getting hired by Square... but I remember the buzz in the community well. It was 1997, maybe 98, and Square LA operated out of two twin white towers. They were gearing up to crew the Hawaii facility.

[@jtsiomb]

Such wonderful machines. I have three SGI workstations in my collection, an indy, an O2, and an Octane2 with V6 graphics. If I can help with anything for your next episode I'd love to. I'm a graphics programmer and I've written OpenGL code on the SGI machines for fun, including stereoscopic rendering stuff for their 3D glasses port. I've also written a silly benchmark called "c-ray" initially for SGI machines, which the SGI hobbyist community popularized, and is now widely used to benchmark processor speed on all architectures, and which AMD used on stage to showcase their EPYC processors recently. One thing that comes to mind is that I could write an oldschool-enough OpenGL benchmark that will be able to run on both SGI IRIX and win9x, so that you can compare OpenGL performance between the SGI graphics hardware and PC 3D accelerators of the time like the riva128. I might even be able to port the same test to glide if you can spare enough time for this, to include 3dfx cards in the comparison, but this is a long shot if you intend to release your next episode soon.

[@lauriebot3941]

Post this comment as a reply to RMC's pinned comment at the start of the thread, he's much more likely to see it...

[@clarenceboddicker6679]

Yes but can it run Crysis?

[@_DarkEmperor]

1999 GeForce 256 released, and then each year new more powerful GeForce. You could make a video with benchmarks comparing SGI and Nvidia for each year. So 1999 best Geforce vs best SGI,then 2000 best Geforce vs best SGI, then 2001... and so on.

[@jtsiomb]

@@_DarkEmperor There was no geforce in 1999. According to wikipedia it was released in december of 1999, and I definitely never heard about it before late 2000 at the earliest. The TNT2 was king in 99, and I still had a voodoo2, then and for at least one more year.

[@JB_inks]

I'd be interested in a performance comparison between these and Raspberry Pi models

[@BrightSpark]

I'd love a novelty mini fridge designed after the Octane.

[@ArneSchmitz]

Bright Spark The injection molds are somewhere around for sure. Question is where...?

[@Jamal_Tyrone]

I picked one of these up for a friend and he paid about 60 quid for it on eBay. With all the internals gutted out of the machine a mini-fridge would probably fit inside. You could also get money back by selling the internals on eBay. I did this with an old Mac G3 and sold the motherboard etc off, but I put a PC in the case.

[@kcat80]

that would be the coolest mini fridge I've ever seen!

[@R0n8urgundy]

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY

[@jeffbenz0s]

Saw "SGI" in the title, clicked and liked immediately.

[@ryanyoder7573]

Me too

[@andrewpbarry]

In the early 00's I was a developer working on a cluster filesystem, snfs, used primarily in the rich media applications, but also in supercomputing. When SGI spun out the remnants of Cray, they were working on a massively parallel vector computer called the X1. We were hired to port our filesystem to the Cray X1, which had a mips-like vector processor and ran a derivative or irix. Since we certainly couldn't afford our own Cray, we had to develop with an Octane and a two-node Origin200 as stand-ins for the Cray hardware. By that time a low-end octane was pretty long in the tooth and an achingly slow substitute for a hundred/thousand processor supercomputer. Builds were not quite overnight affairs, but lord they weren't fast.

[@ryanyoder7573]

I worked for Gorilla Systems in 1996 and we had tons of Silicon Graphics systems for our 3D animators. I as a developer used a Pentium system. It was a great time to be a game developer.

[@jonathankeith524]

Wow, that's awesome! It must have felt amazing working with the world's most advanced technology at the time. I currently design textures for video games and do a bit of 3D-modeling with Blender. Except, my PC that I built a few years ago is already significantly outdated. (PC hardware advancements never sleep, as you know. Haha) I wish I could go back in time to the 90's and use the technology when it was new and supported. There's a certain magic about the 90's computers.

[@sloppynyuszi]

I used this for work. If you watched some of the 2D sequels done by Disney, they were ink and painted, as well as composited with these machines.

[@lrochfort]

I worked for DeBeers in around 2003 at a sub-division that designed and manufactured diamond sorting machines all in a single building. The mechanical CAD team used SGI 02s exclusively up to that point, but it really was the tipping point that year. The price/performance ratio for PCs with GPUs meant that all the SGI, VAX, ALPHA, Sun and Transputer boxes were replaced with x86 by 2004. It was absolutely heartbreaking.

[@lookoutforchris]

O2s were a bad choice for CAD. They were really well suited to 2d, video, texture mapping, video as texture, real-time compositing, etc. almost every news channel weather room had one back in the day for instance. They had some 3D hardware but most of the 3D calculation was done on the cpu. You’d probably be better off with a high spec Indy XZ or if you had the money and Indigo2 or later an Octane. Those were CAD monsters.

[@jackgerberuae]

What software were you running?

[@MichaelGisiger]

Those are not normal optical audio in/out plugs, they are meant for ADAT (Alesis Digital Audio Tape), a magnetic tape format used for the recording of eight digital audio tracks onto a Super VHS tape. And I also noticed, the Octane was "Made in Switzerland"?!?

[@lmvlmv]

SGI had a manufacturing plant in Neuchatel. Was a lovely place to visit but I could never figure out how it made economic sense... We made the Indigo 2 there as well.

[@SpeedySPCFan]

They're not specifically meant for the tapes per say, but ADAT Lightpipe compatible products as a whole. The ADAT input would be an easy way to add another 8 channels of analog input for example (in fact that's what I use the ADAT input on my audio interface for!).

[@nickwallette6201]

Well yeah, today. But its inception was a way to record multitrack digital audio to tape, and then later hard disk recorders.

[@SpeedySPCFan]

@@nickwallette6201 I know that's what the standard started as, I was just clarifying that the ports were meant for anything Lightpipe compatible (interfaces, synths, etc) as opposed to *just* tapes like it seemed OP was implying.

[@mittarv]

Adat is still widely used in most studios to record audio or add channels in digital mixing consoles. Low latency enough to live-mix a concert.

[@axslinger99]

I worked for a firm that did plastic injection molds. They designed the mold on the Indigo2 and the Indy. One of them was maxed out with 640MB RAM. In those days, that was more than most peoples hard drives! It was unheard of. We ran a post-processor called WorkNC on them. Good times.

[@robintst]

"That looks... proprietary." 'What does?' "All of it."

[@WASasquatch]

"Doom, and stuff."**

[@Cubelightfilms]

It is and it is glorious.

[@lookoutforchris]

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

[@ScottsGameAsylum]

SGI computers also rendered the backdrops for the first 3 Resident Evil games. One scene took 3 weeks to render!

[@ClayMann]

I didn't know that. That's some render time! I remember experimenting with early 3D software and day long renders were pretty normal. I would try and get it so an image would render overnight so I could carry on using the computer the next day hehe

[@topy706]

You could render those backdrops near instantly with modern Hardware, crazy how times changed

[@ColanderCombo]

FYI, when Octanes were around the Pixar renderfarm was all Sun workstations, not SGI. SGI's were great at real-time graphics, but the hardware was unnecessary (and way too expensive) for offline rendering. Everyone jumped ship to linux and intel hardware as soon as they could.

[@gregdunlap7538]

Yep, Sparc-20 machines for Toy Story, because they provided the most processing density at the time - four CPUs per each "pizzabox".

[@ColanderCombo]

@@gregdunlap7538 Yeah, although the composition was always changing; basically always choosing the cheapest/densest stuff available--which was never SGI. Sometimes the SGI's on people's desks would get looped into the farm overnight, but I think that came and went.

[@lookoutforchris]

If you had money to burn you could render on SGI. Jurassic Park and T2 used SGI PowerSeries systems to render the cgi scenes in those movies. There’s some great behind the scenes footage, their render farm looks more like a lan party 😂

[@KRAFTWERK2K6]

Aww man i remember the time back then when the name "silicon graphics" always made you think of CGI rendered pictures that were the highest quality you could get anywhere. THE standard that others had to compete against. And then suddenly… they were gone…

[@DavidLindes]

Well, it wasn't really so sudden. As someone who worked there, the demise was a long and slow one, really. And it continued a while after I left, even. But I could see how it could seem that way. There was probably more of a hard cliff in terms of the hype around it shifting to other places.

[@retroshaun]

I spent the first 8 years of my CG career (from 95) working on a variety of SG machines, including the Octane. As well as a year training for a Masters at Uni prior to entering the industry. Fond memories of all the SG machines, I probably need to pick one up for old times sake!

[@growbydoing7290]

I found 45 of them in a dumpster at a recycling plant.

[@retroshaun]

@@growbydoing7290 ...and what happened to them?

[@growbydoing7290]

retroshaun I pulled them out, out of the 45, 38 were perfectly functional. Rest needed repair or became donor parts. I sold them to a company that collects and sells unique things. I do have the empty tower of one though as I liked its look. Been meaning to up cycle into something

[@Arcademan09]

I desperately want to see someone render something with this machine, I love the way early 3d renders look and something about these machines is really something else

[@AnalogX64]

I was a one man IT Department in the 90's (still am :) ) and the company I was working for at the time, we got 5 octanes for the engineering department. I have no idea how much they paid for the hardware, but the Catia and Solidworks software was $150,000 Canadian and it forced me to learn the operating system and patching etc.. and setting up a secure FTP connection to the big 3 automotive companies, since they where being used for automotive engineering.

[@m3chanist]

Hmm, except Solidworks was never released on Irix, it was the cheap package for the pc, windows/x86 only.

[@AnalogX64]

@@m3chanist Its been 20+ years :) yeah solid works was being run on the pc, both Catia and Solidworks was being used for designing car parts.

[@lookoutforchris]

AnalogX64 easy to confuse them as they are both made by Dassault Systems. They often package some seats of SolidWorks for low end work with a seat or two of Catia for high end work in a department.

[@togowack]

@@lookoutforchris solidworks changed names once or twice during 90s

[@Intermernet]

I did some volunteer work for the Archaeology department at Uni in 1997. They showed me around, and were very proud to point out the shiny new Octane sitting at a workstation in the prime position of their lab. I only got to use it a few times, but it felt like it was from the future. The graphics, the immediacy of operating system interaction, the sound, the look of the machine, everything felt like it was sent back in time from at least ten years hence. It made me realise what computers were *actually* capable of, despite the incredible price. That one machine was purchased using the majority of the department's annual equipment budget. I still think it was worth it, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had the chance to play around on one of these futuristic devices!

[@NeuronalAxon]

What did they use it for?

[@Intermernet]

@@NeuronalAxon The official use was for doing 3d representations of dig sites, 3d models of artifacts, and visualizations of geo-political boundaries over time. The last of these was what I was involved with, but we really didn't need the Octane to achieve this. It always seemed like the department head had seen the thing and decided that the department needed it for reasons unknown to me. I wasn't complaining as long as I got to use it (very) occasionally.

[@NeuronalAxon]

@@Intermernet - Cool. lol, I know why he wanted it.

[@klafbang]

My university used them as workstations in the CS department. We had a handful of Octanes, 15 or so O2s, a similar number of Indys and an Onyx or two in the visualization department. We mostly used them for programming exercises, though there were people doing 3D projects on them. They beat the shit out of the Sun 3 workstations (or the older HP workstations), but got sorely beat by a couple of discount beige-box Linux computers a couple of years later. When the SGIs were phased out, I had a choice of O2s, Indys and a couple of the more or less broken Octanes. In the end, I got 4 Origin 200s, including XIO cables. Even at the time the Origins were phased out, they were relatively powerful, but seeing how much power they used, I ended up giving them to a friend who would appreciate them more as I didn't see myself ever switching them on.

[@NeuronalAxon]

Did he get any use out of them?

[@growbydoing7290]

NeuronalAxon They made great targets at the range.

[@lookoutforchris]

Grow ByDoing pretty sad, they’re worth a decent amount of money now.

[@sjarken3979]

In those days i used a amiga 4000/030, cybergraphics graphic card, memory expansion card, ide controller card with memory expansion to run mostly Lightwave 3D. I put alot of hours into making 3D images, one picture i used close to a year to make. And still people consider amiga a "games machine". I dont get that. Thats not what i used it for. Sure i played a few games now and then, but thats not what i used it most for.

[@El_Guapo74]

Nice. I heard Babylon 5 was made on that machine.

[@paulgascoigne5343]

We used amigas in all sorts of areas. In the theatre for instance we used to have a lighting board which was powered by Intel and ran windows, but we needed a backup board incase the first crashed mid performance and then a PC at the side of that incase both the others went down. Talk about redundancy. However for the sound system they used an Amiga 1200 (yes I know! Not an Atari) and it didn't require redundancy because it never crashed and would happily run for days on end without issue. The only fault really was the lack of software available. I always wanted a souped up a4000 so very jealous! My friend fitted his into a tower and took it all the way to 060.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

I thought the Amiga was more than a games machine too!

[@olavaaf2218]

No memory protection made it unsuitable for many engineering uses. SGI machines had Boeing/Airbus/NASA reliability and was even connected to PET scans, MR machines etc. Rock stable UNIX was considered a necessity for serious work-station and "mission critical" tasks. Silicon Graphics machines were the "engineers machines". Amiga was quickly underpowered for many demanding tasks, not to mention Commodore already bankrupt, miss-managed and without vision from the high level management. SGI suffered a similar fate eventually, failing to meet the increasing competent from PC workstations. Overall, completely different class of machines, cannot compare. Octane 2 that came out in 2000 could accommodate up to 8 GB ECC memory, CPUs and OS being completely 64-bit. Years ahead of competition at the time. In fact, Silicon Graphics went 64-bit already by the mid 1990s. Silicon Graphics should have become what Nvidia is today. Complete mismanagement made them loose that great chance.

[@005AGIMA]

Small Amiga's (500, 500+, 600, 1200, CD32) were all games machines and what was in the "home" for most Amiga users. The "big box" (1000, 1500, 2000, 3000, 4000, I've probably missed some as they're not my area) Amiga's were out of the price range of most homes and were....well they were the Apple of the creative industry before Apple took over I'd guess is the best way of putting it. I lusted after an A2000 for flight sims when I was looking to move on from my A500, but the CHEAPER option was to buy a PC, which is what I did. By the time of the P2 and P3 era, I was doing 3D animation (not much and looking back, I was a bit average) but for me it was all on Intel kit, using InifiD and then 3DS Max. Good times.

[@TekTherapy]

Thx for covering the Octane, still have some of my SGI mahhines in my collection. Always had a big heart for the Octane as well

[@bttmfrezzo]

I work for a company in the semiconductor industry where I support equipment that uses this computer as the frontend. It was so awesome seeing you cover this great piece of machinery! :)

[@KahnShawnery]

My neighbor had one of these in '98. He did graphics work. I remember being in total awe of this beast.

[@IIUzzymanII]

Yea ok dude..,,

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

Although SGI workstations were used in modelling and animating Toy Story, the final “print” was rendered on a Sun render-farm of computers.

[@MrVolksbeetle]

WOW!! It's so cool to see titans of the old days in this kind of light. I got the opportunity to see one of these in person. Even though it wasn't turned on it just had this air of awesomeness about it. Naturally, all I really wanted to do was take it apart and see what was inside. Thank you for finally scratching that itch!

[@TheSuperUser]

Back in the 90's I used a network of SGI Indy's running Alias PowerAnimator at a 3D Animation school. The Indy was considered the entry level machine but still had more power than the average PC. The power of SGI kit was just years ahead of anything I previously used for 3D work (Amiga's and dual CPU PC's). These SGI machines were all used in the top film and games studios at the time. My friend worked with the Octane2 at a top games company and he had 2 on his desk - one for rendering and the other for content creation. Alias PowerAnimator was a joy to use and so fast compared to Lightwave 3D on the Amiga or 3DS Max on the PC. SGI had amazing tech and was considered the coolest company in the 3D industry.

[@lookoutforchris]

Feel like your friends employer was unaware of dual cpu Octanes. You could easily bind the rendering to one cpu and continue to use the other cpu for your interactive modeling program. Would have saved a bunch of cash 😂

[@danielsmullen3223]

This was a really tremendous, nostalgic trip. I've become really fond of your "full length" videos like this one, and this is the best yet. Very well done.

[@nealeTH]

I remember the legendary SGI Indigo appearing in my last year of art school where I was studying technical illustration. A number of years later, working as a designer, I was fortunate to be invited to SGI in Reading and see a presentation if their latest work in an impressive presentation room with a huge screen. The animation had an Easter egg reveal of Mario in it and they hinted they were working on a top secret project. This later became the Nintendo 64

[@n__m]

My earliest memory of the Octane was seeing a pallet of brand new ones sitting in our loading dock. Can't even imagine the dollar value of that at that particular time. We did work with them during LOTR but we were transitioning from irix to linux over that three film/multi-year period. I wrote a lot of software on that machine and I still recall how smooth working with OpenGL was on those workstations. fwiw my Octane's machine name was Elrond. At that time every machine in the facility was named after some character or other from the books, and render wall racks were named after towers so Barad-dur etc. :) Seriously great machines and great memories using them.

[@ydonl]

OpenGL was developed in parallel with the hardware that was intended to run it; the hardware covering a range from "lesser" to "more-er", with the software adapting to fill in pieces that were missing in the hardware. There was in fact a fully-software implementation, covering the full functionality of it with no special hardware at all -- just pixels coming out the end. The architecture was essentially derived from everything that had been learned about the graphics pipelines in the earlier machines (by many of the same people), while they were thinking "Hm... wouldn't it be cool if... and then put the feature in hardware...". It was a pretty cool thing, full of clever ideas by clever people.

[@lookoutforchris]

Given that SGI created OpenGL they were pretty meticulous in implementing it on their machines. If you had a machine with full hardware acceleration every single OpenGL function was implemented in hardware. This often was not the case with PC graphics. They often implemented only a subset of the features, with the less used ones implemented in software. SGI even implemented the OpenGL imaging extensions in hardware and there was some 2D software that took advantage of it. You could do some amazing things with hardware accelerated imaging, photoshop has a version on IRIX that used this hardware acceleration.

[@andrewbaker5167]

Great video! I have two of these SGI’s. One works (and still works well) and the other is just a donor machine that is there for parts if ever needed because it’s never fully worked. I’ve always had a fascination with Silicon Graphics machines. Thanks for putting this together.

[@TheRealMafoo]

I had one of these at work. I miss that machine.

[@lactobacillusprime]

I remember seeing this in the graphics department at Uni back in the day. Stuff of legends...

[@ViralKiller]

But does Crysis run Octane?

[@ferencszabo3504]

We never know! Probably not, no OS, no drivers, no Directx, no modern Opengl, no Vulcan. We cannot compare nowadays technics and stuff from back then! SGI was never ment to be used for games.All the 3d software pioneers had some SGI HW, SGI + Softimage was a tough combo to beat! I would love to have some of they machine as a relic.

[@pauldavis5665]

no

[@RZetlin]

You read my mind.

[@tuberoyful]

Yes in 5D🤬

[@morgorth3242]

cant run crysis but it can render crysis level grapics

[@fluffycritter]

Back in 1999 I worked at a defense subcontractor which used a pile of SGI machines for development. There was an Octane on my manager’s desk, and I was stuck with a much lower-end O2. Fortunately, IRIX supported OpenGL over the network via X11’s GLX protocol, and my manager very rarely actually used his computer for computations, so I would usually just telnet into my manager’s computer and run what I was working on remotely for a rather significant performance increase. I wish I could have used his GPU though!

[@10p6]

Nice video. I got to experience SGI in the 90's when I was nominated for a health and safety study. This resulted in me having little reflective balls put on each of my joints, head and body, then several cameras tracking me whilst I worked. Today we call that motion capture, and it had been done earlier than this, but this was live being recorded and displayed on several monitors with virtually no lag. Pretty awesome experience actually.

[@MrShiffles]

4:02 hello, NEWMAN! seriously, well done video on this! Back in the days of my old Pentium Win95 system I used to see these systems advertised on the dial up internet wishing I hit the lottery so I could buy an SGI lol

[@freibier]

When I started work doing IT for the R&D department of the company I still work at today, they decided to get an Onyx2 for virtual reality visualization of the components they designed (to see air flow etc.). That was pretty crazy - must have been 1997 or so, I was your standard PC gamer back then, and here these engineers were doing virtual reality stuff with a beamer throwing the graphics at the wall for others to look at, too. It was like something out of a science fiction movie.

[@markswayne6326]

I was a system admin at Will Vinton Studios from 97-99. We had a few SGI systems along with a collection of DEC Alphas running NT. We had one Octane for use by animators and one in editing suite set up with Discrete Logic’s FLAME system. Most of our CGI projects got final compositing and editing on the FLAME. Examples of work that passed through that system include many M&Ms commercials and the Nissan Toys ad. Two ads we did when I was there still get aired at Christmas time, a Hershey’s Kisses ad where the kisses float around and ring like musical bells playing a Christmas carol. The other is the M&M’s ad were Red and Yellow meet Santa and both are surprised that the other is real. We also did a big 3D movie for M&M Mars Las Vegas attraction that combined live action, CGI, and stop motion with practical effects in the theater. That project funded the acquisition of an Origin 2000 server, among other things.

[@JapanPop]

Yay! SGI! These were so awesome back in the day.

[@genericsomething]

You clicked, you commented, that tells me it's still awesome!

[@JapanPop]

genericsomething you’re right-still awesome!!

[@alexanderdavidsson]

SGI Workstations are interesting machines. Another prominent user was Walt Disney Animation where their own proprietary animation production software CAPS was based on SGI workstation (And initially also used Pixar Imageing Computer for rendering). This software was developed by Pixar. First use was in the ending scene of The Little Mermaid, and first movie produced with the system was The Rescuers Down Under and the last production was the 2006 short film called the Little Match girl. DreamWorks animation also used SGI for their 2D animation. SGI's were also used for game development by companies like Rare (most notably on Donkey Kong Country series) and Travler's Tales. The SGI Indy was the original development platform for the Nintendo 64 and a lot of N64 games were developed on it. I do have some professional experience with SGI, mainly for developing application/tools for IRIX. My private experience is more extensive, and I have used them for 3D modelling, video and some game development. I still own an Octane, an Indigo 2 and several Indy's and O2's. From time to time I boot one of them up for using some old tools I have written or just playing around. I had an O2 as my remote desktop for several years. [EDIT] Changed text about DreamWorks to be more clear that I meant SGI and not CAPS. Changed Pixar PICT to Pixar Imageing Computer. Also read Don Schmidt response about CAPS.

[@ColanderCombo]

CAPS: I think you mean the "Pixar Image Computer", which was a unique computer that did image compositing very well. It wasn't general purpose so it required a host to run the OS and applications; in the case of CAPS it started out on Sun-3s. By the mid 90's CAPS was ported to SGI hardware. CAPS was proprietary and was never used at Dreamworks or anywhere outside Disney. Of course, in the 90's and early 2000's Disney, PDI/Dreamworks and every other studio was pretty much SGI everywhere

[@alexanderdavidsson]

@@ColanderCombo Yes. You are right. CAPS was not used by DreamWorks. My text was misleading since it looked like that I meant that DreamWorks used CAPS when my intention was SGI. Changed my text to reflect what I meant. I can only blame editing error. About CASP, Interesting. I didn't know that it ran on Pixar PIC + Sun originally and then ported to SGI. I thought it was used in tandem with SGI workstation.

[@ColanderCombo]

@@alexanderdavidsson Yeah; when CAPS was being developed (1986-88) SGI wasn't really a thing yet. Most of the logic ran on the Sun with the Image Computer acting like a modern GPU (doing 2D operations). By around '94 SGIs were perfectly capable of doing 2d image processing and the Image Computer wasn't a thing anymore so everything was ported over. To be fair, CAPS ran on SGI longer than it didn't.

[@ColanderCombo]

(There may also have been a period of time around 91-92 that the Suns were replaced with SGI 4D workstations before the full port)

[@namakudamono]

Thank you for another wonderful episode, Neil - I thoroughly enjoyed that! I have to say, the camerawork, editing, content, and pacing of this video are all top-notch. I learned a great about these impressive machines too, not least that they were powerful audio workstations! Keep up the great work, I shall look forward to watching the second episode in a few weeks. Cheers!

[@RMCRetro]

Thank you! Some machines are easier to film than others, this one is so good looking I couldn't help but spend longer pointing a camera at it. I'm glad you enjoyed it 👌

[@MrChristiangraham]

I remember seeing the Octanes when they first came out at a marketing event. I was absolutely gobsmacked at the near real time solid modelling ability. At the time, I was still using an Amiga with (I think) the Cyberstorm 060 board with 32MB or 64MB of RAM and Lightwave 3D. Often I had to run the Amiga with the covers off when rendering so they didn't overheat in the summer.

[@exidy-yt]

Truth. I remember the first time I tried to render a SINGLE FRAME of ray-traced 3D graphics on my Amiga 500 (7Mhz 16-bit Motorola 68000 cpu for those not in the know) and it literally took overnight. A single frame. This was of course a bottom-end consumer model Amiga from 1987 but it's astounding how fast the Amiga grew as a rendering powerhouse with 68060 CPUs, lots of fast RAM, Video Toasters, Lightwave etc....until the SGI machines dropped to near-comparable prices to a fully maxxed out Amiga with 20x the performance power.

[@Lirio2u]

Holy Shit!!! That Big Teal Boi made all my favorite childhood movies🤘🏼🔥 This was a cool story. Thank you.

[@line_noise]

Thanks for the shout out to the IT people who had to lug these beasts around (not to mention the 21" Sony Trinitron monitors!). No need for gym memberships back in those days! I was a system administrator at Weta Digital during the Lord Of The Rings and we had a lot of SGI gear. Indigo 2s, Octanes, Origin 2000s and an Onyx. Our first render farm was a rack of SGI Pentium 3 servers when they first started the switch to Intel. By 2002 most of the SGI gear had been replaced with faster and significantly cheaper IBM PCs with NVIDIA graphics running Linux but I still have a soft spot for SGI and Irix. I'm looking forward to your second video about the OS.

[@filanfyretracker]

I remember thinking how awesome it was to get a Trinitron for gaming, Sony made a fine monitor. Trinitron was probably one of the best tubes period for TV or Monitor.

[@jeremyjohnson8844]

I know this machine and its siblings intimately. Wrote a MIPS R static-rec CPU core and a Fast3D display list interpreter core.

[@NeuronalAxon]

Wow - that's really cool.

[@funkyzero]

We had a bunch of the Indigo workstations "back in the day"... I remember throwing about 20 of them with all the gear in the dumpster years ago. Memories like that are why I hoard things now.

[@lookoutforchris]

Sucks, that’s a lot money these days. These things are seriously collectible.

[@MegaManNeo]

Truly impressive hardware for its time. If I were to hear these specs back in the day, my mind would be blown. Even more of a reason why these things were so big in use.

[@pek5117]

My next door neighbour in the early 90's used SGI machines working for the Military here, i remember looking at them and never being able to touch them cause they were worth almost as much as a house at the time. He would sometimes show me the operating system and how fast it was able to render huge pictures (radar maps). in the early 90's he used a machine that looked like the indigo but was all black, i just remember the SGI logo from it, then went to one similar to this or the Onxy which was all black again but 3-4 times the size of the previous model he had. The power of those machines back then were better than most pcs i had thru the 2000's

[@Jamal_Tyrone]

A friend of mine used one of these as his every day machine up until he moved recently and couldn't get it boot.

[@mapesdhs597]

Is it giving an error message of some kind?

[@Jamal_Tyrone]

@@mapesdhs597 probably... he tends work things out after a while, very nix oriented.

[@t.w.3]

I was working as an IT Technician back in the late 90's. I had technical certification on the SGI Indy, Octane, Indigo2, Octane2, Challenge L and M, O2 and O2+ as well as the Origin servers. Most of the customers was oil related, and had the full-spec optioned machines. I did IMAC and most of the time it was upgrading memory, swapping hard-drives that failed and do software upgrades. I remember Irix 6.5.5 update was "hot" to have back in the day. I used to have full installation media kits for all the SGI machines, but it was stolen from my car. Nice video.

[@brodriguez11000]

" I used to have full installation media kits for all the SGI machines, but it was stolen from my car." Those must have been some disappointed thieves.

[@holleholl3057]

These SGI Machines were legendary for the average computer guy of that time - you proudly looked at your 3dfx-fired version of Doom or Quake in 800x600 resolution thinking "well, the SGI would surely do it x times faster in way higher resolution." It was fun for me to watch you playing Doom right on such a "legend" of the late 90s ;)

[@creato938]

That was the fattest 26 minutes ever, thanks for the video, awesome machine and a best for the time, 2 1080p video streams off the same video card was unheard at the time.

[@ugzz]

Holy Moly, this beast has more memory than my 512mb intel compute stick i picked up last year!! .. Although i don't think the dual 190mhz processors can compete with the quad core atom :)

[@MrDuncl]

Another great video. The last project my late Father worked on was the MAPS particle accelerator add on at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. They gave him a VHS tape which is basically a 7 minute 3D animation explaining what the system will do when completed and commissioned in 1998. At the end it says it was created using "VR Division Software on a Silicon Graphics Onyx Computer". Going off topic you should review a Sun Workstation. That was what I used throughout the 1990s. It wouldn't surprised me if the PCBs in the Octane were designed on Suns as they were the standard hardware to use for things like PCB design back then.

[@andrestrevino8119]

You could create so much A E S T H E T I C S with this machine.

[@thedungeondelver]

This machine was ａ　ｅ　ｓ　ｔ　ｈ　ｅ　ｔ　ｉ　ｃ

[@greenaum]

Wrong format.

[@DVRC]

@@thedungeondelver The Indy is truly ａ　ｅ　ｓ　ｔ　ｈ　ｅ　ｔ　ｉ　ｃ

[@brendonmeyer6677]

I used to administer a bunch of these back in the day. We used them exclusively with the Mine Modelling software Vulkan from MapTek. All the Octanes we had, had the PCI card cage with FDDI cards. My own "personal" machine is a Indigo2 Impact 10000 - yeah - even as the admin, I had to foot the bill for my own hardware (I still have it, it still works and is about 2 ft away from me as I'm typing this now). The upside to "owning" your own machine was that I never had to "share" my Impact10000 as it was *mine* and not the company (Freeport). The production modelling machines used by the mine engineers and the Exploration Geologists were pretty much all top of the line machines and during the reserve calculations which are needed for the SEC filings, these machines were reconfigured to act as a virtual supercomputer. The whole reserve calculation was driven by one machine acting as a "queen bee" and it doled out the computation to each of the other workstations which acted as "drones" during the reserve calculations.

[@MNGoldenEagle]

I was surprised there was no mention about SGI's involvement in video games. They were instrumental with Rare's Donkey Kong Country series and their prerendered sprites, and designed the Reality Coprocessor for the N64 and worked very closely with Nintendo on designing and optimizing the SDK and audio/video microcode. While the Octane wasn't used by Nintendo and SGI for the original work of the N64 (the Indy workstations were more common at the time), they did include the Octane eventually on top of x86.

[@MrDuncl]

He did mention the N64. I would love to see the benchmarks of this vs an N64. When the N64 came out it was way ahead of the average PC which is why I bought one. The only games console that blew me away at the time of launch.

[@MNGoldenEagle]

He mentioned that they shared a common MIPS heritage, but the relationship between the two companies went much further than that at the time (the PlayStation also had a MIPS processor after all). As for benchmarks, the Optane is definitely more powerful. 😉 The N64 had to get by on passive cooling (no fans), so the clock speeds are somewhat limited. Also the processors and the GPUs in the Optane are newer tech in general.

[@luppa79]

Also the late and great 3dfx was founded by former Silicon Graphics workers, so a bit of a connection there.

[@lookoutforchris]

MNGoldenEagle Octane.

[@MNGoldenEagle]

@@lookoutforchris Whoops, I'll correct that. Thank you!

[@PeugeotRocket]

I've been fascinated by these ever since LGR had one one his channel. So glad you were able to share this one. It is quite an interesting model.

[@greenmoose_]

I work in the IT department of a university and a few years back we threw (literally) 4 or 5 of these in a skip... boy do I regret that now!!

[@lookoutforchris]

They’re worth money as collectibles now. Depending on the specs there may have been well upwards of $4-$5K in that skip.

[@Wildmutationblu]

I look forward to the second video. Thank you for taking the time to make this.

[@c-row66]

Im pumped about seeing that software and how it is to use. As a windows user, i have these utopian dreams of computers that work smooth. interesting to see how it feels.

[@cbmsysmobile]

Oooh I used to drool over the specs of the Indigo2 and Octane back in the 90's The un-obtainable holy grail of serious power computing in the 90's. I had to make do with my 486's and Pentiums

[@AndreasLindholm]

Built in ADAT as well which gives 8 in/out optically.

[@renerebe]

yep: kzbin.info/www/bejne/lYrQmHifqdN8bac still need to tweak and theist the rad1 Linux driver ,-)

[@lunarmodule6419]

Ha Man i work with these 25 years ago! Feels like it was yesterday. Thx.

[@MD0MDI]

I still use one of these for Softimage|3D rendering, it still holds it own against my Mac workstations

[@bewsket]

How can it be of any use when you have such powerful computers nowadays with rtx and all that? Wouldnt it take weeks to render anything on it?

[@t6404]

​@@bewsket Check this out: arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1189648 The tezro renders 3D about 3x faster, than Octane2. kzbin.info/www/bejne/hKqcnHt6nbOgkNU&ab_channel=Irinikus "By the time of the last SGI workstation that was released, theTezro, Radeon 9700 Pro was around (and its 256 MB FireGL derivative) which was upwards of 20x faster than the VPRO12 (SGI GPU), had ShaderModel 2.0, and 30 GFLOPS. A 2003 high end PC would have exceeded the Tezro's highest configuration in most aspects. By 2005, a $2000 PC would obliterate it across the board. When Vpro was new, it would have lost out in many ways to the original Quadro (a Geforce), not least because Geforce had massively more bandwidth. Progammability was a little ahead of Geforce, but by the time early shaders were introduced in Geforce2 (SM0.9, never formalised), the gap had been narrowed to nothing."

[@ericksimon2429]

Believe it or not there are still A LOT of Cat-Scan & MRI Machines that are using SGI Octane 1 & 2's in service today. We service more than 15 of them still and we are a smaller outfit. These were and still are incredible computers. Absolute workhorses.

[@thedungeondelver]

For years I wondered why SGI never made a discrete video card for PCs...but they did! The IrisVision card was originally an MCA card for the PS/2 created at the behest of IBM, then later an ISA version was created. It was primarily for DOS but would work under Windows 3.1/3.11

[@thedungeondelver]

Also if you used a 3dfx card, or currently use an nVidia card, or some of the more recent AMD chips, you have SGI DNA in your PC .

[@ydonl]

And... maybe it should have been done during those years you were wondering about it! By the time we got it ready, graphics cards in general had become more performant and WAY less expensive. We were limping along with what was basically a subset of the graphics engines of the mid-level machines. It was cancelled not too long after we actually got it all finished up and shippable.

[@thedungeondelver]

@@ydonl But the IrisVision did ship.

[@ydonl]

@@thedungeondelver Yeah - just not too many of 'em!

[@TheDeathMongrel]

I remember when the power supplies would catch fire. One of my first jobs with SGI was replacing them. We also sent a ton of these to the guys at South Park for Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. After the movie was over, the units all just disappeared. Guess they really liked em.

[@itsGeorgeAgain]

I don't even need to watch the episode to know that this is going to be great.

[@DougHolmes]

We used a few of these at Clockwork Games when we were making Speedster (and they were used on their next game, Vanishing Point) on the PS1 - a couple were for the intro sequence and logos, the other was for the actual level/ car modelling. I was one of the level texture artists and the vehicle texture artist, so didn't use one directly (I was using a PC and a pixel art package).

[@pnvgordinho]

Their computers were pretty cool. Very nice design. I really liked the O2 design and the indy looked like a ps4. :)

[@houstonhelicoptertours1006]

Former 3D generalist, still have mine...and it still works like a charm.

[@Rolenz]

I had the pleasure of using Softimage|3D and Alias 3D software on the SGI Indy during the PC´s original Pentium time.. (around 1994-5) The CPU power of the Pentium was catching up to the SGI´s, but the graphics cards and the ability to do real time 3D was where the SGI´s won so big for so long. Later had some time on the Octane and the o2.. The o2 is still to this day one of the prettiest tower based computers I have even seen. It just had so much style! At about this time (1996-7) we started to get PC cards that could do real-time 3D well, like the Matrox FireGL cards for instance, but they were costly and in many cases not as smooth as the SGI o2 to work with. The turning point was NVIDIA TNT cards.. These cards were a fraction of the price of Matrox´s FireGL´s and other similar PC based high end 3D cards, and could handle the real time view-port in software packages like Softimage|3D. The PC or Intel based SGI´s, the 540´s as they were called were decent machines but for the most part were too little too late. They were basically windows machines that had some VERY clever hardware that made things like the normal PC motherboards north and southbridge setups seem very slow in comparison to it, because SGI did the clever thing of putting the main hardware controller right on top of the memory controler if I remember correctly. So every bit of hardware in the machine had the shortest distance to send data to one central controller which could then fragment the work load and send it where it was needed super fast.. Mainstream PC hardware manufacturers refused to follow SGI´s lead and finding software support for the 540 became almost impossible later on.. Sad because the hardware architecture was absolutely brilliant at its core.

[@APOTwixx]

I used these at Columbia University back in the late 1990’s. They replaced the SGI Indys. Fast, powerful machines for the time. Still had to combine the computing power of a number of them to render an image in a few hours however.

[@TheMalMeninga]

These always fascinated me as a boy. Great vid!

[@FyberOptic]

Just wanted to say that I kind of passively consumed this channel after initially subscribing, but it's really become one of my favorites. I look forward to them now, and they're one of the first things I click in my subscriptions list. It's this weird combination of relaxing and educational, where as so many other channels are loud and/or stuff I tend to already know. I love seeing things being refurbished as well, and you put a lot of effort into making that process into a nice series. So yeah, just wanted to say I appreciate what you do!

Same here

[@paulhansen5053]

I worked at SGI from '89 to '99 as a core software engineer in the mid-range division ("Entry Systems Division") that produced the Octane. I simulated the texture engine and texture RAM chips and wrote system software for the Impact graphics system. That, and the later VPRO graphics were the only systems to ever support "texture border data" which allow me to develop Earth graphics software with overlapping image tiles that were completely seamless

[@paulhansen5053]

...allowed me... completely seamless everywhere around the entire globe. Our GeoFusion, Inc software still has routines to process and display border data, but alas no modern machines support it

[@PeechaLaCosh]

@@paulhansen5053 It would've been great if you'd share your knowledge with the guys who are doing the SGI emulation for MAME. Perhaps you have some tech docs from those days that might help emulate some SGI hardware..

[@paulhansen5053]

@@PeechaLaCosh Thanks for the idea, and it would be an interesting project. For a while after departing I had 3 machines: an Indigo2, an Octane and a 320 workstation, but none of them worked and were taking space so I simply got rid of them. However, I have kept every disk drive from those and other machines and those could, I suppose, be accessed. However, I unfortunately have zero time to work on this and don't feel comfortable simply giving the drives to someone else. Sigh.

[@blakecasimir]

Incredible work RMC. And it's a truly rare treat to see anyone in 2019 on KZbin mention The Shamen.

[@JohnGotts]

When I was an electrical engineering student and worked for the engineering computer network for my work study job at U of M between 1993-1999 I was lucky enough to use virtually every UNIX workstation available at that time, including SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, HP-UX, NeXT, and AIX, but I don't recall ever touching our Irix boxes. I think they were being used in a very limited capacity, for the VR lab. VR didn't interest me much, then or now. Now all UNIX has been replaced by Linux, and MacOS was replaced by BSD. It's a much better time than it was back then with expensive, proprietary UNIX.

[@skraegorn7317]

When my IT Management professor discussed Moore’s Law, he showed us a picture of one of these. And then he pulled out a Raspberry Pi and showed us how much it outperformed it. It’s so fascinating how massively powerful it was in its day, and yet now a $50 single board computer kicks its ass.

[@MEGAMIGA]

I knew that SGI made some killer machines but this is insane!

[@DarrenCoull]

I was privileged to be given a brief demo of an SGI workstation - I was working in IT support at a Pharmaceutical company in Dagenham, Essex, and when visiting a lab to fix a PC that had died, I saw this blue/green thing and inquired what it was - they said it was used for molecular modelling - they explained that on paper, complex models were very hard to visualise and manipulate, so this one had 3D headset and, from what I recall, some sort of wand - I was given a go, and back then, seeing all these molecules and links in colourful 3D that you literally could move around and 'touch' items in 3D space, blew my mind! A few years later, in a another IT job, I remember a rack with several of these (plus some Indigo boxes) on it, that all got thrown in a skip as they had been replaced by PCs. So they truly did have a short time to shine!

[@ordinosaurs]

ISTR (maybe apocryphal) that the very distinctive design was applied so that "the CEO and CFO know at a glance where their yearly IT budget went".

[@greenaum]

Makes sense. Spend just a small percentage of the price on the case, but still 10x more than everybody else did. Then it's OBVIOUS where the money went. Sadly you don't get to do well in management by knowing what you're talking about.

[@SomethingNewEveryDay]

This took me back. Oddly last weekend I was just chatting to someone about using these back in the day. Thank you for making this video and I look forward to seeing the next one.

[@herbiehusker1889]

25 kg, so 55 lbs? That is a heavy monster.

[@mspeter97]

Not the heaviest model they made, a fully decked out Onyx can weigh 98Kg

[@jtsiomb]

As the manual clearly states: "Lifting the Octane is a two-person job" imgur.com/TkOuhct

[@mplabs23]

What's a lbs?

[@herbiehusker1889]

@@mplabs23 lbs is the abbreviation for pounds. It comes from the Latin word for pound Libra.

[@BikingWIthPanda]

@@mspeter97 the Origin 3000 was substantially heavier, it could consume a whole room of rack space.

[@xophaser]

I was working at a gold mine (college intern since my dad worked there), the people with SGI computer were the cool cat. It had the most hi tech software at the time, they were for 3d and mapping ore at the mine. Now any workstation can do this. But those machine were a beast back then and the gigantic sony trintron monitor it came with.

[@vext01]

You can run the latest version of OpenBSD on this machine :)

[@sukraatahluwalia5137]

@mauro esteban rodriguez zubieta That's more NetBSD, since NetBSD is built to be rock solid when it comes to running on old, underpowered hardware.

[@sanjios]

Why would you ? Irix is pretty good ;)

[@lookoutforchris]

You would lose all the special hardware though, no fancy 3D graphics. You’d also lose all the professional applications. What would be the point?

[@vext01]

@@lookoutforchris Because you can? Where's your tinkering spirit? The disk is easily swappable via the front panel, so you can even have a disk for each OS :)

[@zootius]

Great memories. I went to Leeds University, studying Information Systems from 1994-1997. The computer lab was around 30 SGI Indigo machines IIRC. Coming to IRIX from my Amiga 500 was quite a step! I'm pretty sure I saw at least one Octane in the department too. We also had a bunch of SGI Indy's knocking around - they were relegated to the Maths department, with their funky sparkly plastic cases and keyboards looking like the inside of a Wham bar :D I found they were connected to JANET so I ran a NUTS based Talker continually on one which people used to visit from all over the world! Apart from those, all the professors used to have SUN Sparcstations with black and white hi-res monitors. Very classy. In 1996 we also got a room full of PCs with the first Pentiums. We used to look down on them and if forced to use them, only ran an X Server to connect to the SGIs.... Expensive thin clients! By 1997 a new lab had been created which was full of SGI O2's. I used their CD drives to play my music while I did my final year project, which was about Virtual Reaility and displayed data in 3D in NetScape using VRML. I remember being blown away by the 3D power of the machines and was disappointed when I found our new Packard Bell 486DX at home couldn't come close :D Come to think of it, I never realised how expensive all this SGI kit was at the time - many nights I was by myself in the lab and I guess the department was quite trusting giving that 20 year old kid the key!

[@brodriguez11000]

Packard Bell would have been a disappointment no matter what time period. :-D

[@PierreVonStaines]

There is too much tech sexiness in this video, it should come with a warning.

[@Lirio2u]

PierreVonStaines 💋delicious radical modules

[@gonzo3915]

And there is a SGI in it as well.

[@ralpherizonie1785]

U need to get out more find a pysical woman not one you have to pump up

[@ellisgl]

I personally like the Indy ascetics more. Plus I had access to one back in 96. The Indy's cam was awesome for the time (and the environment we were in).

[@TheRetroFuture]

That intro!

[@leap123_]

Oh hi elliot

[@lessismoor5907]

I was a consultant for SGI in my previous life and traveled North America and parts of europe with a ton of SGI equipment. I worked with the Silicon Works team. Ah....those were the days.

[@KuraIthys]

If you had an n64 you didn't just have a MIPS processor, you had effectively an SGI workstation cut to the bone to bring the price down to the lowest it could possibly be... It is, in large part, a machine designed by SGI, and as such is effectively what they came up with when trying to get solid 3d performance to an extremely tight budget... I guess this technically makes it the single most prolific SGI machine in existence... All the early n64 dev kits consist of SGI Indy workstations. They did eventually create dev kits that worked on PC, but that's probably simply because of how expensive an SGI machine actually was...

[@KuraIthys]

I don't doubt that. Passive cooling certainly would limit performance. The no CD-ROM does make sense as a condition though. I mean, it might've been misguided, but there are a bunch of things the system as is would've been incapable of if you had simply tacked a CD-ROM onto it without further modifications. Neither Goldeneye nore even Mario 64 would have existed in their current form were it not for cartridges, because there isn't enough RAM to hold the level data. (Mario 64 has mid-level loading seams out in the open in most of it's stages. That would mean a CD-ROM version of the game would stop randomly in the middle of nowhere to load for 10-20 seconds) There's also the cost factor. It may be hard to believe nowadays, when you can get a DVD drive for $20, but a CD-ROM was quite expensive. Nintendo apparently DID consider a CD-ROM drive, but would only accept at least an 8x drive (all competing consoles had 2x drives at the time), to mitigate at least some of the effects of the device. However, in 1996 adding a 8x CD-ROM drive to the n64 would have doubled the cost of the machine. (yes, such a drive is THAT expensive.) Not to mention that, as alluded to earlier it would've meant the system needed more RAM. (that, or games would've had to have been simpler.) In fact, you can see this in action because of the RAM expansion pak... That upgrade to 8 megabytes may seem like a random upgrade, but in fact it's existence is tied directly to the 64DD... Which, incidentally was supposed to have launched in 1997 worldwide... Which shows how unpredictable such things can be... The primary reason for increasing the RAM to 8 megabytes is to allow slower disk based media to be used without completely crippling the kinds of games that can be made... So yeah, there are a lot of 'might have beens'. But looking at the n64 in detail, while it being faster overall would have been a good thing (on average it pulls a few too many graphical effects relative to it's performance, and it's fill rate is on the low side, taking that into account.) But adding a CD-ROM would've been a mixed blessing, and has as many downsides as upsides. Really, the two biggest problems the n64 has in my opinion is the design of it's texturing system, which is heavily constrained by the 4kb texture 'cache' (I call it a cache, but documentation makes it pretty clear it's management is almost entirely manual, and down to the programmer to deal with), and this seems to be the primary cause of those low detail, blurry textures, (rather than say, the cartridges) And that it's just generally underpowered. Obviously, not in an absolute sense compared to the competition (it's estimated to have about 3 times the performance of the playstation), but in relation to what it's doing. Perspective correct texturing, bilinear filtering, z-buffering, environment mapping, multitexturing... It all sounds great, but pretty much every single feature is a real performance hog (Perspective correct texturing alone requires about 5 times the number of calculations of the affine texture mapping the competing systems used), and requires a high fill rate to pull off. If it had about 50%-100% more performance (particularly the GPU - the CPU isn't as critical, since it's already pretty fast, though it's inability to access memory independently is a bit unfortunate) and a better designed texture cache that made it easier to use larger, more detailed textures, it would've been a clear winner of that generation - at least, in hardware terms. As it is, it's flaws (I don't consider lack of a CD-ROM drive a flaw in an absolute sense, but more of a tradeoff) really undermined it. Still, very interesting system to examine precisely because of how flawed it is, and how poorly it behaved in practice. I recall Nintendo's chief hardware designer for the system recently mentioned how he had optimised the system for maximum peak performance (eg as fast as possible in short bursts), but in hindsight said that in practice, average performance was a lot more important, and he would've done things differently if he got to do it again... Yeah... Strange, awkward, powerful, yet flawed. Quite the system. XD

[@spetcnaz83]

@@KuraIthys so how did PS1 handle racing games and shooters? I am a N64 fan but not having a CD did kind of hurt what games could be made for it. While I am sure it is always a cost vs performance decision, given that the PS1 pulled off Gran Turismo. A game that has to look more realistic than Mario Kart, and can't be allowed to randomly pause to load the rest of the track, manged to do it. I am sure N64 could have manged to do it with a CD ROM as well.

[@kdan_69]

I heard that the PS1 GPU was designed by SGI, too.

[@Cubelightfilms]

@@kdan_69 No part of the PS1 was designed by SGI.

[@Cubelightfilms]

@@spetcnaz83 The cartridge format was substantially faster than any optical media of the day. Where it "hurt" was only in terms of cost and capacity-arguably even those are mooted given the success of the N64 overall-it sold more units than the GameCube. The N64 probably could have accommodated an optical drive (and the N64DD peripheral was more of a step in that direction, though that was also writable), but Nintendo prioritized getting the game loaded quickly over capacity.

[@antjarvis]

Cool! These were the first graphics workstations I used. Good times.

[@DanaTheInsane]

When Steve Jobs calls something great that isn't his I'm seriously impressed.

[@sparcx86channel42]

he used those a lot. these machines helped him come back to Apple after Pixar success.

[@taketimeout2share]

Err, they were his.

[@circuit10]

@@taketimeout2share Well, that his company didn't make

[@foreigncontaminant2015]

Also used to drive GE MRI scanners -pretty fast at decoding the raw data into images. And they would NEVER crash.

[@Patrick_AUBRY]

I used an O2 back in the day at a 3D school. At night we used all the school O2s to renders our work. The joy of using other cpu to get a faster Softimage was a thing too. No PC does that today. The software as to divide the load today. Back then it was done by the os, Irix. I miss this capability of adding others CPU from the network. It was a powerfull concept no OS can do on I386 architecture, not even MAC OS wich is an certified UNIX os.

[@Elenrai]

Honestly, while I am more of a casual PC user, in the sense that I am a mere gaming enthusiast I gotta wonder; why the hell is this not a thing? Id love to rent out the processing power of my PC while I slept overnight! In theory this would surely allow meteorologists n such people with the need for "supercomputers" to simply rely on any X86 compatible CPU in a network, right? Honestly I am amazed this is not more common, id love to hook up older laptops and stack their processing power!

[@Teluric2]

MAC OS cant do what irix aix and hp ux could do.

[@gmcenroe]

In the 1990s I used SGI Indigo2, Origin Vault rack mount with 8 processors, Challenger (?) and an Octane 2 at a biotech research company. We used the Octane to control an nmr spectrometer, the other gear for molecular modeling. We wrote custom software for drug discovery protein modeling etc. I have an Indigo2 at home now mostly as a toy to bring back the past. Good description of your Octane.