sgi

New SGI Stuff Directly From SGI

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SGI guys are moving to an HPE office building so I’ve visited them to take some junk that would be otherwise thrown away. I took one SGI 320* and three SGI O2 workstations plus few small industrial (non-SGI SGI-branded) computers. There was a lot of old hi-end servers, JBODs, FC switches, NUMA link boxes and so on but the storage capacity of my house is limited so I had to let them there.

*) It’s one of their first x86-based visual workstations. It’s not PC compatible and its architecture is similar to O2. The only supported OSes are Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and you need a special loader to get Windows running on this system.

LightWave 3D Running on SGI Indigo2

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LightWave 3D started its life on Amiga as a part of the NewTek’s Video Toaster editing system. It evolved in a good stand-alone 3D modeling software and was very popular. However, when Commodore filed for bankruptcy (1994) nobody in the professional market believed in bright future of Amiga. NewTek needed to find a different OS for its products which resulted in support for Windows NT (x86, Alpha) and SGI IRIX (MIPS).

LightWave on SGI was not a very long story. There were only few versions released. The main problem was in price/performance ratio. SGI hardware was expensive and usually it didn’t make much sense to buy it for generic software that is also available for other CPU/OS platforms. LightWave offered way more performance for the same price on Alpha-based Windows NT workstations which was a preferred option for some time. One year later the market shifted to Intel Pentium Pro CPUs with similar performance and broader software support (Windows NT could run only 16bit Intel-x86 software on Alpha).

I have LightWave 3D 5.6 installed on SGI Indigo2 with 250-MHz MIPS R4400 CPU and the rendering performance is only slightly better than on my 133-MHz Pentium MMX-based Toshiba laptop. NewTek apparently didn’t optimize the program to take advantage of SGI hardware.

Interesting world of UNIX computers

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I’m always surprised how little I know about old UNIX computers. I started with Linux in late-90s but it was just a low-cost/low-end alternative. Silicon Graphics Inc. was the only company that came to my mind when somebody said: “UNIX graphics workstation”. Thanks to a nice article about BZFlag history (which began in 1992) I’ve realized that there were hi-end graphics workstations even from HP and they had impressive 3D capabilities. In addition to that, HP had four times bigger market share than Silicon Graphics Inc. (workstation market, 1991).

The PC market is more about stand-alone components. These UNIX workstations were about perfect integration of hardware and OS and that’s why even today it is very pleasant to work/play with them. I would be very happy to have modern Linux looking and behaving like old IRIX on SGI computers. After playing a lot with SGI Indigo2 (1995) and O2 (1998) I consider the system very intuitive, stable and easy to configure in comparison with modern Linux distros.

SGI 1600SW

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A friend of mine gave me this interesting piece of hardware. SGI 1600SW Flat Panel was introduced in 1998 which was quite before LCDs became common. There were not so many LCD screens for desktop computers before this and those which were available usually had smaller resolution – 1600×1024 is not bad even by today’s standards.