A $36,000 Graphical Workstation from 1993 | SGI Indigo 2 

I’m glad this showed up in my recommendations! I worked at SGI from 1996 to 1997, it’s still the best and most fun job I ever had.

You know, people always talk about "It's a UNIX system! I know this!", but for me, the best line from that scene is "Ellie, boot up the door locks!" 😆

I worked for an asset management company in the late 90’s and we were literally junking these things, breaks my heart now!

In the early 00's I collected ALL of the SGI machines I could get ahold of when they were cheap and easy to find. I had many Indigo 2's, O2's, Octanes and I have 2 Origin 2000 racks in my basement right now :)

I had a fleet of these machines. They were *INSANE* machines for the time. We had about 140 of them (we were government) with dual attach FDDI sitting on the GIO. Had 4-5 machines on a ring with a DECSwitch connecting everything up.

I was in film school in the mid-90's and took a 3D modeling class and we used this exact machine, except that ours "only" had 32MB of RAM. That was at a time when most home computers had 4MB, though, so I still thought it was crazy - it'd be like a machine today having 256GB of RAM. We ran Alias for 3D modeling, which is the same software used to make those movies you mentioned. It took about 10 minutes to render a single simple frame (not anything complex or realistic like in those movies), but the results were pretty spectacular in the end. I've always wanted my own Indigo2 ever since then - congrats on getting one yourself. Irix at the time was definitely light years beyond any home GUI-based OS - I felt like I was seeing the future (and in many ways I was).

As a former SGI Technician I have never see the red Indigo 2, but on some other models I have seen custom cases for specific customers. I do still have one of the many Indigo 2 I have owned over the years, kept this one because of how unique it is. It is a Impact R8000

I love watching vids like this because it's amazing to see just how far computers have come. These systems here truly were unparalleled powerhouses in their day, both from a hardware and software standpoint, yet nowadays even the most low end modern gaming PC can run circles around them.

I'm an Indy owner. I can tell you SGI is the best ever.

Fellow Portlander, thanks for doing a video on this, for sure a top tier recommendation. Definitely looking to obtain and preserve one of these in the future. Happy to see a piece of history going to a safe and knowledgeable home :).

When I worked a student worker sysadmin at the Engineering Research Center at my college I had to transport 5 of these in my car across campus. The value of computers in my truck was like 10x what my car was worth. I feel very lucky to have come up with access to machines like this from the Onyx servers to these amazing desktop machines. Fun times! Thanks for sharing.

One little curiosity I've always wanted to see with these machines is how the 3D modeling software works. Especially compared to modern day Blender. I've never seen anyone try to showcase a sort of "doughnut tutorial" for these old SGI machines, so it would be cool to see how people in the 90s modeled in 3D.

1:51 Toward the end of analog TV stations and networks, every show segment that wasn't live, and every element in every show break was already digital and ingested to in-house storage. Everything played out of spreadsheets and dedicated TV equipment racks. These computers were part of that method.

Worked for SGI when they acquired Alias|Wavefront and became a product specialist on their Maya project. This was groundbreaking and till this day still the biggest leap taken in 3D tech imho. I still have several old SGI's sitting in my office where my most precious one is a completely original Indy R5000 XZ. Everything down to the stress ball, cardboard cube and protective plastic is still there. I have such fond memories working for the company back when EVERYTHING was possible.

Only a couple of months ago I was in a nostalgic mood and reminisced using these SGI Indigo workstations for refining x-ray and neutron diffraction data to determine and visualise crystal structures of novel materials. Fun times.

I worked at a VR headset startup in Seattle in 1995-1997 and we had two Indigo 2s, an Onyx for engineering and an Indy as the webserver. They were prototyping the designs on them and printed using a stereolithography 3D printer. I only had a user account on the Indy, but drooled over the other systems.

I feel your happiness when finally one gets to play with one of these. I got a chance to fix and keep for a year an O2 and an Indigo 2 with Monitors back in 1997. I was ecstatic.

I had the reverse problem with Sync-on-Green: I came into a 21" Sun monitor in the late 90s that I wanted to run on a PC. My solution at that time was to get a Matrox Millenium II PCI card, which was one of the few mainstream PC video cards that could output sync-on-green.

Ah terrific! Yes I used SGI machines and also Sun Sparc. Good times 1989 to about 2007

Man, a certain number of years ago I worked at a research lab that used SGIs as servers and workstations. I worked at an Indigo like that. They were totally gorgeus and still are.

That was awesome all around. Love the jurassic park connections.

I met two kids in highschool that borrowed money from dad, bought a SGI and started a VFX company in the 1990's... I would have dreamed of having one. At the time the best I had for rendering was a 386DX and it was really slow. The brothers from school had a 486 at the time I met them. I was working with early Ray Tracing that took forever to render a single frame but was often saved as a raw Targa file. TGA was 24bit, and 24bit color wasn't something that was cheap in the early days. There really wasn't a lot of options for decent graphics, and that what made the SGI computers so nice at the time.

All the early CGI hardware was legendary. The resulting media products can still make you laugh today xD

yippee my favorite niche computer youtuber grahh

From what I can gather the red indigo2 with the weird badge at 2:04 is actually one of the early prototype designs for the Impact R10k systems. I believe that none exist nowadays sadly.

Love to see you play around with this absolute monster of a workstation, i have a couple SGI machines and it is loads of fun to play with :)

SGI systems are so cool. I have an Indigo and Indy still, that a coworker gave me in 2006 (including a webcam, SGi CRT and the legendary 1600SW). It's fun to try and spot them in old movies. Aside from JP, Disclosure and Congo come to mind!

glad to see more people talk about retro stuff like this

6:18 i felt that anticipation during boot XD

the interface and visuals of these unix'es are so great

i had both of those at work...running CAM software back in the day....they were awesome.

I actually managed to score an R10000 IMPACT model off eBay in the summer of 2000, and ended up using it as my main desktop for a year or two. That time was a sweet spot, when these sorts of computers were old enough to be affordable on the used market, but new enough to still actually be useful as general machines. Went kinda overboard with my UNIX workstation explorations back then.

this brings back memories... i worked on this and the onyx.

This machine (or another SGI machine) was behind the making of my favorite arcade game, Killer Instinct! I remember being blown away by the graphics in that game when I first saw it.

SGI had everyone on styling. Even their big servers were beautiful. I fell in love with SGI, when I was young and my friend was taking some graphic design courses and they used SGI O2s.

Pretty cool to see. Thanks for the video =D

One of the most aesthetic computers ever made

great memories..I used these on the first spider-man film among many others..

tbh idk what else i expected besides another banger :)

Fun fact, some Land Rover dealers in the US used SGI workstations. I was doing IT contractor work at one of them in the late 2000s. I think they were Octane or O2s, I can’t remember… I just remember how floored I was knowing they spent that kind of money on their infrastructure.

Thats the video I waited for since I saw the making of Jurassic Park as a kid

My only personal experience with SGI systems was that a web hosting company I worked for in the very early 2000s hosted customer websites on them.

i have literally no use for one, but I've always wanted an SGI machine!

3:10 - Elan is actually the middle of the pre-IMPACT stack, it's exactly half of an Extreme, the latter having twice the raster engines and twice the geometry engines (Extreme's 8 GEs giving 256 MFLOPs total). The Indigo2 Technical Report on my site has full details. Elan has 4 GEs and 1 RE. Below Elan is XZ (confusingly named) which has the same single raster engine but only 2 GEs. Here's a strange thing, by Feb 1996 the R4K/250 Indigo2 with SolidIMPACT was actually cheaper than the same config with Extreme, even though Solid was 2x faster and only used a single slot. SGI had some pretty weird pricing structures, though back then RAM was often the larger pricing component (a single 128MB kit was about 10K). Infact, at that time an Indigo2 with Extreme was priced exactly the same as XZ, though one can't tell from the price lists whether XZ referred to the half-Elan SKU or to Elan in terms of GE count. In Indy, XZ is the same as Elan in Indigo2 (4 GEs and 1 RE), while in IRIS Indigo it's also referred to as Elan, with again the 2GE version detected as XZ instead. SGI's technical and marketing names sometimes didn't align very well. 7:00 - Yikes, 5.3 is pretty old. Drop me a line if you'd like a disk with a full 6.2 or 6.5.22 install, happy to help out (just search for "SGI Ian", send an email to my Yahoo address). Note it was I who supplied the Indigo2 reviewed by LGR, likewise the Indigo2 and O2 parts sets reviewed by Gamers Nexus.

What a glorious era of computing; these monster systems from this era are fantastic. I've a decent collection of Sun and HP Visualize workstations, but there is definitely a gap in the collection for some SGI's. Had a pair of Octanes many years ago but sold them when I needed space - major regret!

Used to be lots of these around the Seattle area. Most were surplus from Boeing, who used them for CATIA. I used to have 4 of the purple version of the Indigo2, and still have one. Mine has an R4000 processor clocked at 250 MHz, with a then-massive 2MB of L2 cache.

super neat video!

Yeah, we had a ton (probably several tons, actually) of SGI equipment back in the day where I worked... Probably at least a similar amount of Sun equipment.... pretty much a bunch of every model they made from the lowliest desktop to the biggest server bits of both.

I've played a train/vroom game at 9:04 a lot at work as a student. We ran an SGI Indy as a web server and practicaly as a lab toy at the time :) Had a original monitor, keyboard and Polk speakers.

everyone's focusing on how stylish these machines were. they're missing the real reason for these machines: they could do modern multiwindowed productivity work a decade before it could be done on personal computers. imagine coding, compiling, testing, looking up documentation, etc. on a DOS machine, how many steps and waiting around that would have taken. Then compare to doing that on modern UNIX using these computers. that's how the $30,000 price could be justified.

Woah I wanted to buy that exact sgi I was literally looking at the ad a while back, so glad you got it. I somehow had one when I was like 9 years old and no idea what happened to it.

This was so, so dope!

i have couple MRI with SGI octane 1 and 2, is a new model of the Indigo. still working properly without any issues after 25 years

These were fantastic workhorses. Used one while I was at CST (Color Systems Technologies) to color B&W movies and some light visual effects. Also used one as a digital coloring station (mostly CD-Rom animation) while at 7th Level. Super easy to use and didn't crash too much. A solid machine.

i remember how much fun my friend and I had playing w/this when first came out.

I’d love to own a SGI. Someday. Keeping it in working order might be too much of a challenge though.

You said SGI was aiming at the "pro-sumer" market but that would suggest professional gear that some high end consumers might want. This hardware was WAY out of the price range of even the most hardcore enthusiasts at the time and the only non-professional spaces you could find these were in universities. These were "professional" machines with a capital P.

Really cool 🤓

this is insanely cool dude

Happy IRIX-tan noises 😄

the onyx graphics servers were beautiful

Used one of these back in the day. Never got used to the GUI. It was more Mac-like in style and likely why graphic designers found them more friendly. Personally, I preferred Sun Sparc workstations as they were more intuitive.

I saw an SGI Personal Iris from the late 80s at VCF East this year - It was pretty cool! Very interesting video, I'm really into old tech!

I remember working in the early 80s on an $80k Z-80 system called "Chromatics". At that time it supported 64k colors on a 640x480 resolution.

this is sick another great video SGI INDIGO LESSS GOOOOOO

Anyone with a little soldering skill can make a sync stripper and extract the sync signals from the green channel using a LM1881 chip, some 74 series logic, and a handful of passive components. People have been doing this for the PS2 for a while.

This gives "Beyond 2000 show" vibes. It was a childhood technology show which used to appear on Cable Discovery Channel.

I used this system and back in the day it was the cat's ass for a CAD designer! I was a HUGE Unix programmer at the time and these systems were TOP-O-THE-LINE but like everything times change! Today ALL CAD designers use Windows based systems as I do and there are TONS of hardware configurations available the was NOT an option then! I still miss Unix somewhat as it offered features that were "cutting-edge" back in the day that can now be done in the Windows OS platform to a degree. Does anyone remember the Sun Sparc systems of this era? I used these as well! Add-on graphic tower platforms that you could use to warm your sandwich for lunch on top of!

Too early in the video to know if any of the other Nekochan folks have checked in, but I, misterdna (name chose for Hammond's DNA character in JP and Devo's "Smart Patrol"), owned an Indigo2 MaxImpact wtih 1GB RAM. The weird thing was you had to be careful about heat. My RAM modules were 128MB each, but they were double-decker SIMMs with flat-flex ribbons connecting the two halves. Absolutely insane amount of RAM, as mentioned, but still specialized even in 2005 when I bought my system. I never did get the TRAMs for my Max Impact graphics board set, but I managed to find a 100mbit Ethernet card in EISA form. I shifted my attention to my trash-find Octane2 before I could get that card working, though. -- edited for fat-keying.

this is really inspiring me to pick up an SGI Octane. ive always wanted to have one in my collection

Good Old Lovely Irix 4dwm... I STILL love this gui to the universe... ;) MOTIF was a lesser blend, but still my favorite if no 4dwm is available. ;)

Very cool. In my apprenticeship i got the task to remove all Hard drives from Old used PCs so they could be sold. There where also SGI Indigo 2s and SGI Octanes there. Also some SUN Ultra 2x machines. I really found them interesting, but sadly i had no monitor to connect to it. I wanted to play with that thing. I think later i found i the pile a corresponding monitor so i could boot up the Indigo 2 and wanted to play with it. but not much luck it was password locked. When i remember correctly. And i still had a task to do so not too much time to fumble around with that. :D So Thank you for that video. :)

The OSSC would have also converted the SOG signal via the VGA port, at which point you could output via DVI or HDMI back to VGA

The coolness factor of this machine is just over the top, especially considering it still works, and works well! Just the fact that you have that 'file system' interface from Jurassic Park makes it all that much better! The GUI layout looks very similar to what I have/had on a 2003 HP J6750 graphics workstation. It ran HP-UX 11.11i and used CDE (Common Desktop Environment) for the GUI. It was a bit limited, since I really didn't have any of the graphics packages for it, just the basic install of HP-UX and the CDE GUI. Later on, I switched it, and a J6000 workstation, and a RP2470/A500 server, over to Debian PA-RISC Linux, although it wasn't until just last year that I got the J6750 to actually run a Gnome GUI desktop.😉

What do professionals use today as an equivalent? The cloud? Or maybe just a desktop computer with a 4090, a Threadripper and bunch of RAM? Or if it's in the movie industry, they just use large server farms.

I had one of these, got it right around the time they were slightly outdated and starting to fall behind, so they became mostly affordable. I also had the cyan one and think I had the same specs with the Elan graphics. I wish i still had it... I can't even remember what I sold it for or when exactly, but now I regret selling it. I had the big 21" granite fixed frequency monitor and the granite keyboard and mouse too. Damn it, why did I sell it???

i used to work at a trift store and out back was a pile of old computers and monitorsand i had to smash them open with a hammer and year out the boards and wire, and there was a few SGI's, that hewit packard "corner PC" a shit ton of tandy and IBM PC's, and some NEC's, that were covered in mud and water logged and this was before i knew you can restore water dammaged computers, but i wish i would have taken at least the SGI's home with what i know now, that could have been lucrative

he spared no expense

HE FINALLY MADE A VIDEO ON ITTT

The holy grail of primitive 3Dness

How does this hardware compare in specs to modern hardware? It's amazing how much these go for today.

When I was in the Navy back in the early 1990s, I always wanted either an SGI or a NeXT.

So how do you get the IREX OS for this? Or any other software for that matter. ?

I only ever saw these in actual real world use in open-cut mining operations, as they ran the absolutely mammoth Gantt charts (where you plot them on A0 and join up 20+ pages, then 'walk people through it' - literally). The collage I went to had one of the SGI toasters, but nobody seemed to know how to do anything useful on it. (p.s. I'm watching this on one of those "wierd dell monitors")

most simulators with militairy or scientific purpose of the time ran on SGI

I saw a few of those at the Goodwill in Sunnyvale. I should have bought them all.

I run ran across that sync adapter in a box of random stuff a couple months ago. I had no idea what it was for. Ill be listing it on ebay when i find it

This is f*cking awesome!

I remember see a couple SGI's in the Engineering computer lab at U of M back in the day, but Sun & HP machines were much more numerous. OpenGL came from SGI GL im pretty sure. They were cool machines for sure.

Pretty sure the graphics labs at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena CA were loaded up with these in the 90's. I also remember some theft around that time as well. The parking lot was right out the door to the second floor and the graphics lab was below that etc.

Can't forget the Baofeng when traveling 😅

I'm always curious what the results would be if you did a prime-seive drag race between this and the various generations of Raspberry Pi's.

The Playstation 2 (a mips machine) had an official Linux kit that also required a sync on green monitor. The easiest way to find a sog monitor, was just to buy a Sony. I think Sony made all of the SGI monitors, so the controller in all of Sony’s CRTs supported it.

I love the industrial design of SGI's workstations and servers; i do actually own an late model O2 (a rm5200 system), but i may or may not have killed either the system board or cpu board or both (hopefully not though).

32MB of RAM ? Thats a life time of upgrade there

I still have my mouse pointer customized to be colored red on my Linux box in honor of Irix.

Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word !

I appreciate your astolfo figure

What a neat piece of hardware! I love old hardware like this and this one is kinda special if you ask me. I wonder how the workflow for creating VFX back then on something like this went- the software to me is even more interesting than the hardware but it was mostly all proprietary stuff with huge costs and finding that stuff is likely even harder than finding the hardware to run it! I'm also curious as to how much something like this goes for these Days, I didn't catch you mention how much it costed but if you don't want to share that I get it. Really neat vid!

Check out the "pinch" demo. It's fun.