> Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse. The machines were powered by between one and four MIPS processors (originally the R4400’s) — ranging from 100 MHz to 250 MHz.<p>250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era.<p>> The RAM on these machines were not industry standard [...] and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version).<p>8 gig of RAM at a time when home users didn't even have 1 GB hard drives. 16 GB of RAM at a time when a home user's desktop could read memory at < 100 MB/s.<p>Having those specs then would be like running a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now.
I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. As I recall each artist had an SGI Indigo2 and later on the SGI O2 because the standard artist workstation. I believe our lead artist used an SGI Onyx. Programmers had Indy2's with the internal N64 development boards.<p>There were at least 2 rack mounted SGI machines used for large-scale rendering jobs (ie promotional images, magazine covers etc). May have been SGI Challenges (I know one certainly was) and were kept off-limits to most staff, at the time they were rumored to cost $250k each.
Ah yes, good ol' SGI, it always brings a smile to my face reading these old war stories.<p>I wish we could get some insight on the development of the first successful 3D game on PC, Quake by I'd software as there's a famous picture of John Carmack sitting in front of some SGI workstation with a monitor with a resolution ox 1920*1080( in 1995!)<p>Also, SGI powered most VFX Studios of that era, so many great movies went through those machines before ending up on the big screen.<p>It's insane how quickly 3dfx, Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely obsolete within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a blast.<p>But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or black square boxes.<p>[1] <a href="https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc6167be68994602a2be1f4153f81d5c3effa2" rel="nofollow">https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc61...</a>
Such a Lisp Machine is usually one machine with two screens. Typically it would be a XL1200 (or earlier an XL400). It would have a black&white console and a color screen. The color screen would be driven by a color graphics card, possibly a FrameThrower - which is an accelerated graphics card.<p>The graphics editor seen is just the S-Paint part of S-Graphics - it could use a FrameThrower, but also other graphics cards. There was also S-Paint on the MacIvory running in a Macintosh. S-Graphics also ran on earlier Lisp Machines from Symbolics, like a 3670 from 1984.<p>A bunch of TV studios, video production companies, animation studios and game developers were customers.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4</a> from 6:09 shows the using such a Paint system on a Symbolics.<p>The software it runs is S-Graphics, which was later ported to SGIs and Windows machines as N-World, by Nichimen (then using Allegro CL from Franz Inc.).
It was a common practice in the 90s for creative engineers to use extremely expensive "supercomputer" workstations to pay for productivity gains & live on the bleeding edge (e.g. Silicon Graphics workstations, NeXT workstations, and so forth). Question: What is the equivalent way to do this today? That is, is there a way to pay a lot of money to use a computer which is 5-10 years ahead of its time?<p>Ok so I'm pretty biased here, but I think the answer lies in VR computing. There's no doubt VR computers are more expensive than their PC/laptop counterparts, but they allow you to adopt a bleeding edge technology which is essentially 5+ years ahead of its time in terms of where it is on the "commodity computing" frontier.<p>A good quote from Alan Kay I find pretty inspirational on this front: <a href="https://youtu.be/id1WShzzMCQ?t=3345" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/id1WShzzMCQ?t=3345</a> Here he basically advocates for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a computing machine, in order to compute on what will be a commodity product 10-15 years into the future. VR computers aren't this extreme on the cost curve, but I think there is something to this point of view which I find really inspirational.[1]<p>[1] Caveat: I'm one of the founders of SimulaVR (<a href="https://simulavr.com" rel="nofollow">https://simulavr.com</a>), so admittedly am very biased here. But I do think VR provides a way to convert money into "better compute" in a way that hasn't been available since the 70s-90s super workstation era.
I'm glad the middle screen is explained, Symbolics always gets overshadowed by SGI. If you want to see it in action, watch this: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU</a>
I'm astonished by the amount of money Squaresoft was investing in game development at the time. Obviously, it paid off big time for them, but I can't imagine they realized the game would be as successful as it was. If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never understood why the game was a success.
I remember being on a stand next to SGI at E3 in 1997. They had a giant black truck in the arena like the one that Knight Rider drove into. They were selling these machines that looked way more powerful and expensive than anything the games industry could afford. People at the show were mainly debating when and if Intel could release a 1ghz processor. Stange what you remember.
Also there was a Final Fantasy film produced at that time that took 1000 workstations, 200 persons and 4 years to render at a cost of $100m+. Thought it made only $80m.
>The RAM on these machines were not industry standard — they were proprietary, 200 pin SGI RAM modules available in 16MB, 64MB, or 256MB variants. The memory board (known as MC3), had slots for 32 memory modules — and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version).<p>>Think about that for just a moment. This was the mid-1990s.<p>Let's pose the more theoretical question of what is the most powerful computer that could be built if enough recourses were summoned to make it. We're talking a single rackmount. What about a rackmount the size of a city.
Wow this brought back memories! In the late 90's, I got to work on SGI machines at college learning 3D animation in Maya v1! The school had 4 labs with about 30 SGI O2's in each; all networked with no security. I could send messages from my workstation to the teacher's open terminal session.<p>No one there knew (or cared to learn) IRIX. When they converted the biggest lab to Windows NT4 everyone abandoned the SGI machines. Which worked out great for me, because it was much more peaceful in the SGI labs compared to the NT4 lab. Some of those StarCraft matches could get kinda rowdy!
This sort of archaeology is great fun. I spent a huge amount of time figuring out what was happening on the screens in the first Westworld film (1973): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ</a>
Oh man the memories of this time. Around 97-98 was when workstations were on the way out and workstation cards were on the way in, but regardless these SGI boxes were just so lustworthy - the style, the performance, the <i>otherness</i> and clear superiority in all dimensions to my lowly hacked together PC.<p>I was just a teen getting into 3D animation & game design in 1998, and since I couldn't ask my parents to mortgage the house to buy one, I wound up picking up a workstation card instead - a footlong Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 402 with 32mb ram and four 3dlabs chips - for a much more reasonable $750 used. I think about a year and a half before these went for $4k new, that was the pace of 3d innovation at the time. It suited me really well to learn Softimage 3D on until I got a job at Pandemic Studios as an artist/designer. Even this beast of a workstation card couldn't run Quake without errors though, there was still a separation of functionality between consumer 3D accelerators like 3dfx and the $1k+ workstation ones.
In the video game I'm writing, I made the enemy computers blue and purple in color -- as a tribute to SGI in the era when it seemed RISC architecture really was gonna change everything.
I started a video game company in 1994 that used SGI Indigo workstations to render animations created in StrataVision 3D [1]. The artists and animators would model, surface and animate on Macs and then send the files to the SGI machines for fast rendering. I can't remember the name of the SGI rendering software or find any signs of it on the internet.<p>If we would have had the funds, it would have been nice to put Alias on the SGI boxes. We were later able to purchase Lightwave for Irix which was pretty nice, but StrataVision wasn't that bad in retrospect.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrataVision_3D" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrataVision_3D</a>
In case this article piques your interest to try out a modern version of IRIX:
<a href="https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/</a>
Hard question to ask, but what was the workflow used in development? Two programmers sitting at many monitors powered by x different workstations, and a monitor. What are they all doing, say: here?
> Genera is an operating system, originally developed in the early 1980s, by Symbolics.<p>> … a fork of the LISP Operating System developed at MIT. Virtual memory, a full GUI and window manager, neworking, Emacs… this thing had it all.<p>I’d never heard of Genera until today. I read about it earlier this morning in an article on <i>non-C operating systems</i>¹.<p>> Symbolics, the company which owned the first ever dotcom domain, built an entire OS in Lisp, called Genera. The last version, OpenGenera, ran on an emulator on DEC Alpha workstations, and today you can run it on Linux, but sadly the inheritors of the defunct company won't open-source it.<p>¹ <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_systems/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_syste...</a>
Very sexy setup for that era. As a kid I went to a computer faire near my hometown in the relative middle of nowhere and not only did I get to check out a Video Toaster, there were two guys there with an Onyx. As an SGI obsessed dork, I almost fell over. If I recall they used it primarily for architectural visualization. It was running a scene with trees that were two intersecting rectangles with texture and transparency maps. It’s hard to convey how cool this was at the time. Plus, that machine was in the $100,000 dollar range in 1995 dollars. Fun times. I’m bummed that over there years I lost the very slick printed material SGI sent me on their machines because I called up an asked.
I received a demo of a $250k SGI when I was about 14 (1990). It powered a military F16 flight simulator and the experience was nothing short of mind blowing. Those machines were tightly packed magic.
Something I completely didn’t appreciate as a kid is that they designed an entire 3D scene for every background and rendered a 2D output of it. For some reason I just assumed it was all drawn.
I could say "I'm not that old" but I guess that's subjective, since the article says this is archeology.<p>I think it's been said elsewhere, but those entry level SGI boxes were around $25,000 in the mid 90s (and oh boy did I ever drool over those things back then).<p>I made out alright, with some friends on IRC having mailed me warez CDs, from their tiny middle-American town in Iowa to my depressed backwoods in WV... precious gold discs arrived loaded with wintel based 3D modeling and DAW software.
Forget the machines: I'm vaguely impressed by the controllers with lots of weird buttons, with analog knobs, and I think with some LCD screens—casually sitting before the monitors. These days every home video editor can buy such things—but were people doing much software video editing in '96? Wonder how many of them were sold in a year.
I was strolling in the mall when I noticed a really cool movie on a TV inside a random store; it was ffvii. Damn, I was like, this is the best 3d I have ever seen. By the way, I had never played the game by that point, none of the franchise. I kinda got familiar with the Loren just so I could watch the movie. Excellent job
I studied 3d animation in college from 2001-2004. Our lab was outfitted with tons of SGI Octane workstations. By the end, we were getting better performance out the the one lone mac there, though. Was such an awesome animation lab. I kinda miss those days.
Oh this post brought back so many fun memories of college days playing Flight Simulator on SGI boxes in the computer lab. Having used IRIX on SGI Indy, Windows 3.1 on PCs seemed like a toy.
A bit random, but, the guy on the left must have been nodding or something, and the camera being used had a slow shutter speed. I did a double take in seeing two mouths.
the onyx reality engine was a true beast. I did a lot of computer graphics work in the late 90s and it was a very impressive tool. everybody laughed at my linux box running software OpenGL!
There used to be such a wonderful diversity of architectures, operating systems and platforms in comparison to today's boring landscape of really only 3 end user platforms and basically 2 viable server environments. Alas, i miss the old days
In another life I worked on a SGI Onyx for Print PrePress of Rotogravure Cylinders. Now I am working in VFX and sometimes I read up on the history of it usually the Onyx pops up and even if I did something completely different than the VFX artists at the time I get nostalgic.