Hello and thank you for watching today. Thank you to Ian at sgidepot and to Kai for hanging out and helping to make this. Also be sure to check out NordVPN at nordvpn.org/RMC and get yourself a bargain while you still can. Neil - RMC
@@musicianie Must be nice to live in an area where you *can* change ISP's. Some of us don't have that luxury - some of us live in areas where there's only one viable broad band option.
Interesting. I have an old Sun Ultra 30 with 300Mhz. But it only has 128MB ECC EDO DIMM. I found 8x 256 EDO DIMMs that fit, but are probably not ECC. Do they still work? I don't wanna throw them in and the thing breaks. :D
Useless information: The architect behind IrisGL and OpenGL, Dr. Wei Yen, was also the Nintendo64 lead architect and created the GX graphics library, a proprietary Nintendo dialect of GL optimized for games. After the N64, he and a few of his colleagues left SGI to form ArtX, the company responsible for Flipper, the Gamecube GPU. ArtX was then purchased by ATI, with Wei Yen then serving as member of the board at ATI, and was a big contributor to ATIs legendery 9800 GPU. Wei Yen was also a member of the board at Monolithic Systems, the company responsible for the 1T-SRAM memory used in Gamecube and Wii, founded AI Live, the company that did the middleware for the Wii Remote, and he also led Acer's cloud division, which handled Nintendo's online platform in the Wii days. He was also president and CEO of iQUE, Nintendo's distribution company in China at the time. I think he completely left the field roughly ten years ago, and hardly anybody ever heard of him, but he was incredibly influential back then.
3Dfx was founded by ex-SGI employees and 3Dfx GLide (i believe GLide was the official 3Dfx way of writing it in the early days, but that could just be me remembering it incorrectly) was 3Dfx's own API based on OpenGL. 3Dfx later became 3dfx and GLide pretty quickly became Glide IIRC. Oh the nostalgia of my original and early Orchid Righteous 3D, the early version making an actual audible click when going into 3d mode... That click was pretty loud as well and it was just such a very satisfying sound.The click was probably from some sort of relay on the board, but that click combined with the animated 3Dfx logo just plays on my nostalgia guitar strings! The Orchid Righteous 3D was, i think, the first 3Dfx Voodoo graphics board. It was glorious!
Back in the 90's I read a lot about these machines and how they were used to create movies and 3D videogames. It was a dream that someday everybody could have a computer with this level of creative power. Now we are in the future, and seemingly limitless computer power is available to everyone for very little money, but the dreams of a future world also seem to have disappeared because there is no contemporary equivalent of SGI to show what a good future would be like and to inspire people.
To get close to the experience of buying an SGI. order yourself a new (2019) Mac Pro. Select maximum for all the options e.g RAM and SSD size. Then add in two or three Pro XDR Monitors, and don't forget the monitor stands :-). Of course the majority of SGI workstations were bought for professional use. I have never used one but used Sun workstations a lot and am hoping Neil will review one in the future. If you are talking about working for SGI then I would imagine a job at Oak ridge Laboratory or similar might be equivalent. Their systems make the new Mac Pro look like a toy.
Yep i worked on SGI in late 90's to 2001. it was a big deal. Was for engineering stuff, fluid mechanics and differental equations. One was the slab and the other was a honking night stand on wheels. thanks for the tour.
About fluid mechanics i can confirm, since i heard (and partially confirmed) that the University of Cagliari had Silicon Graphics workstation (i know for sure they had an Indigo R4000), and the CRS4 (Scientific Research Center in Pula, Sardinia) had many Silicon Graphics workstations and rack mount supercomputers (from the IRIS 4D to the Onyx²) for scientific research (and there are still videos of them working with IRIX)
Lol, I have an SGI Crimson that doubles as a desk and internal storage. The slab is my Indy. I have been working with SGI computers since 1998. Was a interesting ride for sure.
I used to work for an SGI dealer. I was their "IRIX" person, as I did Unix. I loved playing around with the workstations when I had the chance...One of my favourite demos was the tumbling asteroid with the particle spew...it was later used in the opening credits for Star Trek: Deep Space 9. You can see both the demo reel segment and the opening credits in the links below... SGI Demo Reel: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-p2qivAkzKZY.html Star Trek DS9 Opening: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2TsMyLt2BTM.html
I used Octanes in our animation lab and had no idea about their prices, but I discovered that Maya and Softimage 3D were freaky expensive. I then tried to do some of the stuff I did on those on a slightly newer computer and it just died.
Blender is born on Amiga as TRACES, then evolved as Blender on the SGI Indy. The first version was 54k of C header files and source code. Anyway, SGI is maybe the most badass company that ever existed
Studying digital 3D in the late 1990's, I remember Lightwave, Maya and SGI pretty well. SGI machines were the best you could get, but they were ludicrously expensive, well out the reach of a student budget. The software applications weren't cheap either, and us students had to resort to piracy to get the applications. Other 3D software used at the time were 3D Studio Max (PC only), Infini-D, Alias Sketch!, Extreme 3D and Cinema 4D. The hardware I used at the time was Apple Macs, running on a 603e or 604e CPU and render times (in ray trace quality) were long... very long. Things got better when the PowerPC G3 CPU was released, but by then, I had moved on to other things. Fond memories studying 3D, creating worlds, creating textures. You had to double check everything before you did that final render, because if there was a mistake, you would have to wait another several hours for a rerender.
I remember seeing the Silicon Graphics demo on Bad Influence and being in awe. My mind is blown that a few years later, I’m watching this on essentially a super computer multiple times more powerful and that fits in my pocket. Thanks for documenting so beautifully these machines which were built by pioneers and which ultimately paved the way to what we are blessed with now. Magic! 💫
The SGI was also an IO MONSTER! we used as enterprise Backup Servers. The amount of high speed tape drives and networks on could attach to the SGI was great. The XFS file system was fast and incredibly reliable . XFS had cluster aware, had it own volume manage and you could do snapshots with it. Features that are now coming to others,
Love the trip back in time. I had friends who worked at SGI and took a Irix Sys Admin course on the SGI campus in the late 90s. I am not a graphics professional but do appreciate how you presented the Octane. We ended up using a Sun SPARC at that time and I hope you can find a similar age Sun SPARC system to show off. Keep the videos coming!
Folks, THAT is how you professionally produce video content. As always, Neil, great work. I'm still floored how modular and thought through SGI's hardware is. Those poor in-house engineers but then again at the time i'd imagine they all were over-the-moon creating never before scene technology to really drive performance, stability, and modularity. What exciting times it must have been not unlike the first railroad tracks being laid down across unknown lands and the thoughts of its future potential! Neil, keep doing more SGI content.
An SGI engineer told me in the late-90s that their ethos was, "What can we build you guys for $50K?". And it was top-down design with high-end tech flowing into low-end, eg. Octane is basically just a single-node Origin2000 with a gfx pipe shoved into one of the XIO ports (the 8th port unused; in Origin it connects to other crossbar ASICs). Alas this approach faded in later years, it all become bottom dollar, etc. This though is partly why IRIX is so stable, it was designed to cope with mega high-end systems like Origin/Onyx2 (try writing kernel code to cope with 32 CPUs all hammering one GigE port at the same time - SGI tech told me the initial drivers they received from Intel fell flat on its face, while their own early mod made the Intel chipset melt because the card was never expected to hit 980MBit/sec), so running on a mere Octane or other IRIX desktop is like a yawn fest for the OS. :D Note that all I/O tasks and numerous OS functions automatically exploit both CPUs aswell, so a dual CPU system is snappier too. The CAD Duo option was particularly interesting; two users, two kybds/mice, two monitors, dual-CPU Octane with dual-SI or whatever, both users can work flat out and never notice they're sharing one machine.
I remember watching a live demonstration of the SGI Octane in 1997 and they showed the production of commercials and movies such as the Fifth Element. It was cool tech at the time and many components in PCs we use today has roots going back to SGI hardware
My Octane is the last of all the obsolete UNIX workstations I’ve collected over the years, that is still setup in my office and gets powered on at least once every month. I have mine connected to an SGI Presenter flat panel display. I also still use two SGI 1600 SW displays which are hooked up to my MacPro 1.1 running FreeBSD. SGIs stuff was built to last! And IRIX was an amazing OS...any OS which comes preloaded we the shareware version of Doom is more than alright, in my book 😁 Also, it’s still pretty easy to get open source software installed on IRIX, thanks to a project called nekoware. EDIT: Almost forgot to thank you for shining a light on the awesomeness that was SGI. They seem to be quite underrepresented on RU-vid when it comes to retro tech, unfortunately!
Couple of points about the IRIX and Octane... If anything I would say IRIX is very plug & play, in that just about everything the OS was ever intended to support is already known to it, so most of the time one can install a hw option and there's no need to do anything, just reconfigure the kernel and reboot, in most cases just reboot (the GigE card needs a reconfig, but the QLA12160 and dual-serial card I put in the PCI Cage don't). Some options do require separate drivers, including most of the video I/O boards, but certainly not a clean reinstall. As for changing a gfx option from one to another, again one doesn't need to do anything as long as one is using the same generation of gfx, eg. SI, SSI, MXE, etc. are all MGRAS, while V6, V8, V10 and V12 are all VPro. Thus, in this instance, upgrading to MXE required no changes, just power up and it's ready to go. If one changed from MGRAS to VPro though (eg. upgrading from MXE to V12), or vice versa, then indeed one must reinstall some key libs in miniroot inst, but only bits of the IRIX eoe, X libs and gfx demos, no need for a full reinstall (this has no effect on installed apps or user data). One just reads in the original relevant CDs (or from disk as I do), enters a couple of commands that mark for reinstallation any item that needs to be changed, let it run and that's it, reboot and it's done. Complete reinstalls on SGIs are rarely ever necessary. Mind you, if one was running Flame on such an upgraded system then of course one would have to replace the Flame config file with the relevant alternate version, and likewise if then installing video options such as the DM2/DM5/VBOB, etc. then those do need drivers. That btw is why I erred towards MXE and DIGVID, as setting up an Octane2 with VPro and video options is a lot more involved (the VBOB alone is enormous and it needs quite a few cables, plus a DCD card and V12; alas I have no V12s atm). Re the PCI options, as is so often the case with such tech, there's sometimes a relevant caveat or gotcha. In this instance it's the bridge chip that converts between XIO and PCI. Although the PCI bus is 64bit @ 33MHz (the usual max theoretical 267MB/sec), the interface ASIC doesn't work that well and thus over a single PCI link can't do more than about 187MB/sec. However, it does scale well across channels, I've managed almost 600MB/sec with an Octane using four different XIO ports and a bunch of QLA12160 HBAs, and 700MB/sec should be possible if I didn't use any gfx at all. For its time these rates are enormous. SGI btw fixed the ASIC design for the Fuel/Tezro systems and XIO2, they work better and support much faster PCIX at up to 133MHz aswell. Re the dual-port FC card, that model is a copper card with 100MB/sec per port. I cannot offhand remember though whether the connection through to the host is direct XIO or if it goes through the same XIO/PCI conversion ASIC mentioned above, though with a max 200MB/sec it wouldn't matter that much anyway. Neat part about FC is very high scalability; an original Flame/Smoke setup I obtained from one TV studio in Leeds had two 15-bay FC units, each filled with 73GB 10K FC drives, for 2TB total. That was a heck of a lot back then. A Smoke Octane I bought from BBC Belfast had a similar FC array filled with 36GB drives. In Flame/Smoke of course one would define at least one disk in each Stone array to be a parity drive for data protection. Atm I have six original Discreet systems (three Octanes with Flame/Smoke, a Tezro with Smoke, an R4K/250 MaxIMPACT Indigo2 with Flint, and an Effect O2). Hey Neil, pity you didn't show the Huge Engine Model, with transparency - one of the more impressive textured demos. :) Did you try out DI_Guy, F18, Matterhorn, Macau and the others? Ian. ---- General ref: www.sgidepot.co.uk/octane2/sgi_octane2_datasheet.pdf www.sgidepot.co.uk/octane/
Have fond memories of SGI (and Silicon Graphics) hardware in the 90's. The pre-press and print bureau where I worked had Barco Creator, an image manipulation application, running on Iris Indigo and raster image processing (RIP) software serving film recorders on SGI Indy.
That's ironic, one of my Octanes has an original Barco Creator setup on it (dual-R12K/300 MXE with DIGVID); seems to run fine though I know nothing about it. I didn't know it dated back to IRIS Indigo though, very cool.
@@mapesdhs597 I started in that job in 1992 and it was there before me. I was just the junior so I didn't get to go to Belgium for a week to train on it like some of my colleagues! It was way more powerful for compositing than Photoshop at that time. The Silicon Graphics hardware could handle files that you'd never dream of trying to manipulate on Macintosh hardware. It had what must have been a very early Wacom tablet and a Barco branded monitor. I did learn how to FTP files back and forth to it at the command line to and from a DEC Alpha which served output to a Kodak LVT film recorder, input from a Mac with a drum scanner and backup to open reel tape. The Indys came later, replacing what were probably 386 DOS PCs, bringing the RIP times down to a fraction of what they were before. I can't remember the name of the software they were running. What I do remember is the vivid blue of the cases and I'm pretty sure the monitors were grey with a lighter grey fleck? Like no computer I'd ever seen before, or since for that matter.
@@totallypixelated Yes that does sound like they were Indys, and indeed Octane was a powerhouse for big data related to visualisation. I talked to a guy at Chevron who said they used basic SI+Texure systems for GIS, but the machines could blast through 750MB volumetric datasets in less than three seconds, something utterly impossible on PCs of that era. They had a 12-CPU POWER Onyx for larger datasets. Interesting factoid: MXI and MXE gfx options use SLI to double performance. An SGI tech once told me this wasn't the case, but the technical report shows it is indeed the case: www.sgidepot.co.uk/octane/octane-technical-report.pdf
"but first...are you watching this securely?" Well, I'm wearing a five-point safety harness, flamesuit, welding gloves, a crash helmet and three condoms. That's pretty secure.
Loved this video. It would be *REALLY* interesting to hear more from Anthony about Inferno. Given its unobtainium status, I think many of us graphics nerds from the 90’s still lust over Inferno illogically to this day. I for one would love to get a sense of just how close does a modern AE/Premiere rig get to an Inferno rig.
I have an Onyx3K multirack which I think used to be an Inferno rig, but I can't be certain as the original owner kept the CX-Brick (and hence the original system disk). See: archive.irix.cc/apocrypha/nekonomicon/forum/3/16720350/1.html Inferno for IRIX is not unobtanium, but probably not worth bothering with these days unless one has an IR4 and can still make use of it for compositing. Discreet lmited the host processing side to only 8 CPUs in order to push Burn lics, ironic when 8 CPUs in an Onyx is virtually an insult. Some day I keep meaning to benchmark a max-spec Inferno rig (8x1GHz IR4), but it's a tad hard to retain any quad-1GHz node boards I obtain as they keep being sold on. :D Not selling my IR4 though, that's for keeps. I have one quad-1GHz board atm but it's acting weird. Ah well, maybe next year.
Part 1 was awesome, part 2 is even more more awesome-er :) what would be truly epic, and i think would go down really well is if you could shoot an episode complete with 90's style 3D effects/rendering and compositing all done on the octane, man i'd love to see that! probably be a labour of love though, but your the kinda guy that could pull it off i'm sure ;)
Loved every second. That can still compete with the machines I use for 3d modelling and video editing. I use SBC's tho(I review them on RU-vid). Too bad many are still missing opengl drivers. I can't wait to see part 3 with it in the hands of a graphics artist. Let them make an awesone Intro of your RetroManCave. Just love it. Thank you. Greetings, NicoD
Silicon Graphics computers were The Holy Grail to all kids who grew in the 90s and after the films like Jurrasic Park, Terminator 2 all of us wanted at least could touch one of those. Thanks for this excellent video.
I find it fascinating that the new Mac Pro have a similar internal layout/design philosophy as this old SGI workstation. It's refreshing to see properitary solutions as they are often different from the ATX standard. The external access of AIB have finally become commonplace through the Open Compute standard in servers, which is mainly used for network cards.
In a different thread I was just comparing the price of the new Mac Pro to SGI equipment. However, even an SGI was cheap compared to bespoke equipment like the Quantel TV Graphics system Neil reviewed recently. As for ATX the original idea was to reduce costs by using the PSU fan to cool everything, not improve performance.
Holy shit, Lightwave 3D, I remember using a pirated copy on my home computer running Windows NT in the early 2000’s, and having to run a render overnight for a five second clip. Those were the days.
Thanks for the video Neil. Very interesting to hear it's story and of the Open GL origin, I had not realised that, not being previously familiar with the Octane. This would very much of been beast mode on in it's day!
I was seventeen when this and other such systems entered my awareness--by way of a mag-a-zine. I dreamed in Babylon 5 and, ahem, "acquired" applications until I could afford real hardware/software in my early twenties. Watching this resurrected my sense of wonder and nostalgic desire. It was nice to remember how it felt to see this tech for the first time, and then the first time actually using it. Thank you!
Thanks for the awesome trip down the SGI memory lane. Back in the day I would have killed for that kind of power. Oh, and any application that ends up in Autodesk's hands in guaranteed to just live on in a zombie like state. It's the Autodesk kiss of death. Take it from a 23+ year former "customer" that has seen many applications that I owned just walk off into the sunset with that company.
Very happy to see it running. Such a lovely machine, I'm really jealous. :) All the tech porn aside, I think what SGI really championed was stylish cases. Those things are works of art. Especially if you consider how computers typically looked in the 90s... SGI were so far ahead of everybody back then, it's mind-boggling. It's a massive shame they never managed to transition into more of a serious workstation-type company, they might've survived then. You literally can play the what-if game with SGI stuff for hours.. What if they picked up free Linux or BSD early on, and focused more on regular workstations and consumer hardware with the crazy hardware skills they clearly had? Would Windows NT even have had a chance had they done so? Would ATI and Nvidia even exist? PC history might have turned out very differently, for sure.
The trouble is the crazy hardware skills cost money. All the workstation companies like Apollo, Sun and SGI went out of business. Not that surprising as all the CAD software I use at work now runs quite happily on a standard desktop PC.
IRIX was variety of UNIX System V with BSD extensions, so all it would need is better desktop environment. You could run GNOME on it... If you type more /etc/fstab, and more /etc/mtab you will see... It does the same thing it did on Irix machine... Joking aside, a core functionality is there. MS was the end of SGI in more ways then one... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API)
woah! incredible bit of kit.. when you think what it was capable of in the mid 90's.. and even today some of that isn't available on today's pc's.. it's very impressive.
Perifractic has just done a series of videos with the original Worms cut scenes in Lightwave - It would be interesting to see how quick this bit of kit renders them in full HD :)
Was looking forward to a mention of VRML and CosmoWorlds, it originated from SGI and was magical futuretech in late-90s. Got myself an SGI Indy in part just to play with it. It's only now with VRChat that we're finally catching back up to virtual spaces built back then.
Although around 2000 that I got the Indy CosmoWorlds was released on Windows already iirc, might've been bit of an excuse for more nerd hw. Great video nonetheless! More of the same please.
CosmoWorlds was very cool to mess about with, and before that just with gview and SceneViewer. I did include some VRML demos on the system, I think the one about Octane is there.
Great stuff. It is hard to see it in context, but I got into 3d animation in the late 90s with 3d studio Max, and back then, this kind of real time performance was beyond most budgets. We were just taking standard desktops and throwing ram and gpus at them but while that was great for games, oddly, 3d editing software didn't really work well with that budget approach.
SGI had quite a few ex-Commodore people there when OpenGL was made, though I'm not sure if they had a hand in it. The Hombre chipset and new AmigaOS that never made it out was going to work with it, as retargetable graphics was planned for it.
OpenGL was just the open sourced development of IrisGL. The earliest SGI machines were called IRIS, and the name stuck around for a while (Professional IRIS/Personal IRIS/IRIS Indigo). So the graphics library was called IrisGL from the beginning. So IrisGL goes back to around 1981 when the company was formed. The Geometry Engine ASIC which SGI invented (we’d call it a GPU today but that’s not quite right) implemented the IrisGL in hardware. So they’re tightly related. SGI decided to open source their graphics library/api in 1992 and make it an industry standard. So if there were some Commodore folks around in 1992 I don’t doubt they worked on OpenGL, but it’s not like they brought the tech from outside as it has already been part of SGIs dna for ten years at that point. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIS_GL
I started to watch this video with my BT headset on which somehow decided to switch to a GSM codec from the 90's....I thought it was part of the video... :')
If Sun had licenced zfs under GPL etc, it would probably be the default today due to the advanced features it has over a number of other filesystems, but the licencing means it won't be included by default in the Linux kernel.
You need a license to run software. Not sure what's so strange about that ? You need to fire license server, flexlm server, so maybe it's actually possible to run it on that machine...
I miss my SGI Octane R10000 w/ MXE that I bought ~20 years ago. I remember it was a great heater during the colder months with its 10000BTU output. I remember paying less than $1000 at the time and that came with a huge 21" SGI/Sony monitor. That texture memory really made a difference. It'd be nice to see the F-15 demo that showed off beautifully rendered anti-aliased lines. I think that was a Performer or OpenInventor demo. Really enjoyed the video!
FYI: 1920*1035 is equivalent to a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, used in movies where having a wide angle is not important. It's 1920*1080 counterpart has a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, used in RU-vid videos, modern video games, and cheaper smartphones.
Interesting that it has odd number of pixels, though. That doesn't get along well with digital displays these days (trying to help someone render a video with an odd # of pixels and the common formats didn't support it)
Great video! I used this machine every day back in the early 2000s. The responsiveness, robustness and reliability of the hardware and OS made it a joy to work with. Irix 6.5 used quiet audio effects throughout the UI to give effective feedback, a feature I still miss somewhat in modern UIs.
I remember working with the SGI flame back in the 90s with the FCAL over fibre, connected to a raid array... incredible indeed! It was almost as good as the Quantel Henry, HAL, and Series V Paintbox
There is another 3D beast software you are missing on this platform is "Softimage|3D" which I was begin with in this industry. A powerful competitor to maya.
I notice you refer to this as an SGI Octane. In 1997 they were just called Silicon Graphics with the logo on the machine or Silicon Graphics Computer Systems (SGCS). When they got into trouble and basically went broke in 1999 they rebranded to SGI (SiliconGraphics Inc) but legally was still named Silicon Graphics. The reboot didn't last too long though, and they were in trouble in 2005/2006. A minor revamp occurred but by 2009 Rackable Enterprises bought what was left of a bankrupt SGI. Eventually, in 2016, SGI ended up in the hands of HP Enterprises.
A machine build for a purpose when no other was up to the task yet, deluxe content creation. Sure, you could create and render some FLIckerfiles on your 486, it would take you a day to render that 10 seconds in 320*200 and it would look like made 3D Construction Kit.
I'm sure back in the late 90's early 00's we had this system running our Smoke online suit. It cost more than the whole business was worth at the time. We charged £295 + VAT per hour (not in London so was prob double ish there). The whole patch bay had to be rebuilt for SDI connections and transfers to all the various formats of the time. Makes me feel old now!
I remember reading about the SGI machine in a computer magazine at the time. Me and a cousin dreaming of owning one and the types of games we could play on it 😆 In my defence, we were both 11 😅
I used to work on Alcatel network switches which had similarly fragile backplane connectors! Great video and a system way ahead of it’s time with it’s influence felt in many modern places.
I often listen to either the "Groove Salad" channel on Soma FM or the "Chillout" channel on Digitally Imported FM, but I never hear any of the tracks you feature in these videos - a great shame, because they'd fit perfectly and I enjoy your selections.
Nice informative video. Now i'm looking forward to you doing a review of the Transputer, ideally the Atari Transputer Workstation, which for 1989 / 90, was the fastest renderer bar non.
As a teen, I collected a few older systems. Ebay was often cheap during this time. I had an O2.. great system! Also had a sparcstation 5, bebox, and nextstation turbo color. I wish I had kept all 4, or at least the o2, bebox, & nextslab.
