SiliconGraphics O2 Vintage Workstation - It's a UNIX System, I Know This 

Wow this kid is a PROPER nerd, rare breed today

This bloke genuinely gives me hope for the future.

wow...this is the first video i have watched on this channel....and I was shocked to see how young he was. Awesome to see someone so young that is interested in these niche machines (or older computers at all)...seems younger people these days that are into computers just care about 4K gaming and VR...

In 2006 I worked on an O2 like this, on a local TV station. (weather forecast "automation"). I didn't realize how powerful it was, beside its age (about 10 years), it was already a dinossaur.

i worked in the robotics department at a major shipyard in the 90's. We used SGI machines including the O2 and the Indy for 3d modeling. They were great machines, and I still miss the Irix OS. I got my first taste of Unix on them as well as the actual robot controllers which ran command line Unix with no GUI.

My 3 O2 are still beautiful and rest on my desktop as a reminder of how I started with Power Animator 7 in 1996!

Thanks for the video! Worth noting that the O2 *was* intended from the beginning to be heavily used by the medical industry, because its UMA design meant it was ideal for processing volumetric data sets (I've sent quite a few O2s and parts therein to hospitals in the US, Canada and all over the world). Before the O2 launched, I talked to a surgeon in South Africa who was helping test the O2 for SGI; he told me that the O2's performance when dealing with MRI datasets meant he could cut the time taken to prepare scan data for a report from an hour to just five minutes - live saving stuff. Also note that when O2 launched, its UMA design meant that it was 4X faster than the best PC one could buy at the time (Intergraph) for Challice/Shake, holding several benchmark records for some time before PC gfx raw performance finally caught up. Even then though, O2 was still good for some tasks many years later, eg. ILM told me they liked using them for compositing, and a properly updated O2 (eg. using Cobalt from the VW320 and a CPU like the R9000) would have been something ILM would have bought a "truck load" of ("We could edit 2K in cache!", the ILM guy told me, hoping that SGI would release a newer system with a CPU containing 16MB L2, something IBM said was perfectly possible, but of course it sadly never happened). Other industrial tasks where O2 excelled (and still used today) are image processing and textile manufacture. Many of the O2 spares I sell go to textile companies. People probably think 3D when they consider SGIs, but a lot of companies have to work with very large 2D datasets (same applies to defense imaging, though they tended to use Octane/Onyx2). Or sometimes it's the video processing combined with the video I/O that's relevant, eg. I know of a pig slaughter house which uses an O2 to process UV video data for calculating muscle mass/position, controlling the cutting machines and preparing more accurate and fair payment data for farmers. Then there's GIS for which O2 was well suited as a low-cost alternative to Octane. This was before VPro came out, so the larger VRAM capacity of VPro wasn't yet relevant. MXI could handle large texture sets very well, eg. Chevron Nigeria told me their Octanes could process 750MB datasets massively faster than any PC, but an Octane MXI was expensive. And of course there's the O2 that went into space! 8) The only COTS machine ever to do so AFAIK, though sadly it was one of the Mars probes that NASA lost because of their usual screwups (data entry mixup, metric/imperial, something like that, I forget). I did test rotating an 800MB 2D image one time on O2 and it worked ok, though of course not as smoothly as a more realistic workload such as a 4K (50MB) image. Still, it didn't barf, which it definitely would have done on a PC of that era (I remember people trying such things on GF4 PCs vs.VW320s which operate in the same way as O2, the latter were 100X faster for high-texture datasets in VR for urban modelling, mainly because of the use of large composite textures). Ian. PS. More arch details on my O2 info pages: www.sgidepot.co.uk/o2/

Keep up the good work kid. Get em. I like the format of your vids only thing I would say is I was nodding out and at the end your music scared the shit out of me so a little Loud on the outro compared too the rest of the vid. But over all this and the octane vid very well put together buddy. Keep it up.

As a nerdy UNIX obsessed teen in the 90s this was my dream machine I was never going to afford. Then I discovered the Linux project and made do with a almost but not quite homebrew project on my Intel PC in the years before it blew up to what it is now.

A new interest of mine has been born! Awesome videos, dude.

I loved you in Stranger Things

Another use for the O2 was as a graphical front end. If you ever see photos of a room full of 02s it's likely they were all logging on to a high power server that ran the heavy duty applications and the 02s only ran the graphics part. In my business we had a VAX computer the size of a filing cabinet running the VMS OS in another part of the building that did all the heavy number crunching and next to that computer was a dedicated file server in an even larger box. The room had its own power supply and cooling system and went years without needing to be rebooted.

It’s important to note that there were very few standard components in those days. Also, the proprietary SGI graphics pipeline was the foundation of SGI’s business, and lives on today as Open GL. They were in the hardware business only because that was how you did it back then. MIPS was an independent company before SGI bought them out. Originally, SGI was also making their own CPUs until a third party contracted SGI to build them a workstation using MIPS CPUs. This resulted in a shotgun wedding that worked out.

Dodoid you rock. Excellent historical reporting. I wish this os would come back in some form although mac osx and even nextstep had more advanced capability

Awesome! Looking forward to the rest of the SGI videos!

Came here from /r/retrobattlestations. Excellent video, informative and well-written.

Dude keep doin what you do....your a smart kid and keep it up.

You remind me of myself at that age keep learning

I have my o2 in my home office along with my 27 inch iMac, my 2 Thinkpads running Linux and my 2nd gen Bondi Blue iMac.

I used to work on one of those back in the late 90s. The operating system was called Irix which would be in the family of Unix, Linux and all those similar types of OS and i hated every moment of it lol

Amazing video, nice work

If you still have it before selling or scraping, Please Consider giving it to a Museum of History and Industry, or Seattle's EMP Computer and Tech Museum.

sweet looking light box segments

those machines made most of our beloved games in 90´s

Great video brother i got 2 OS machines from our weather system at my tv station im gonna put on ebay soon. Thank you so much.

Very well done buddy! Subscribed :)

Talking 'bout unix workstations, I think I still have an sparcstation 5 somewhere in my attic.....

$15,000. I guess Hammond wasn't lying when he said 'spared no expense' (except for paying the actual techie....)

Dude if you can manage to not get hooked on drugs, be screwed over by some girl that broke your hearth, or run into some nasty disease you'll be Einstein when you're 30.

Awsome 👌

EXCELENTE VÍDEO!

I watched ebay so often to get an indy or indigo 2 impact for under 500 dollars...I think those times are gone. The collector prices rise.

Brilliant Video Man Really Enjoyed it. r/retrobattlestations for life!

Seriously, you're making me feel bad for giving my 02 away . I could build out a better desktop with better hardware, so I really didn't see a need to keep it. Although, I kept the keyboards. The best keyboards in the business. Even though I loved Slackware, the one thing linux couldn't beat on the 02 was the desktop. I still pine for that thing, and wish someone word port WM skin for it.

Wait so were these the same machines that created Super Mario 64?

great video!

Hey im here from OSFT

Rare used SGI computers for the sprites in DKC 1-3 and KI and KI 2

Why don't you put your SGI machines to use, and edit a video for RU-vid on it? That could show they're still useful to this day. I mean, it's better than having them just sit there looking pretty. Even though they look pretty.

good stuff kid

How do you look for companies getting rid of these?

Cool!

dude you ware born after the ipad!

Cool video but just some constructive criticism. You talk very fast, I think you need to slow down and pace your speaking a little better. Was a bit overwhelmed with how quickly you were talking.

Did Doom get ported to this

Can it entrap dinosaurs though?

as much as a BRAND NEW car you mean?????

This is nice and stuff... But it's no mainframe. Just kidding. Hope you got the reference.

Nice vid, try installing some software....fun times.....

You still collecting dude??

You're so pretty man.

Where's the note 7 ps I love your videos

They had iphones when you were born

76th like

Lose that horrible music

good stuff kid