In 1993 I bought a used SGI Personal Iris for 10k.
32mb Ram, 1GB hard drive, 19”monitor. Monitor and system weight 80lbs if I remember correctly.
Alias was an additional 16k.
It sounded like a jet engine.
I loved it.
32mb Ram, 1GB hard drive, 19”monitor. Monitor and system weight 80lbs if I remember correctly.
Alias was an additional 16k.
It sounded like a jet engine.
I loved it.
That was 20 years ago, when these machines were "only" 10 years old. Amazing how quickly things developed during the 90s; the Sparcstation 5 started at $3,995 (over $7k in today's money, and the sales price was probably higher still here in Europe), and ten years later you could get it for free!
I ended up giving it all away to a friend; when I was young I had a lot of time and interest to play around with this sort of stuff. These days, not so much.
A lot of them (probably the vast majority) simply got dumped, alas. I personally decided to dump a Challenge (basically an Onyx without the Reality Engine graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx). As in: I could have it if I wanted it, I used it for years but it had to go when it was obsoleted. I could have put the rack in my basement, but I'm not young anymore and it wouldn't be that many years before it would be a headache to get it out. So I said: "Sorry. Dump it."
Smaller is more manageable of course - I have a number of O2, O2+, Indy computers and an Octane. And a Fuel.
At work we had a bunch of Origin servers as well. All dumped.
Back to the Onyx - when it came out in 1993 I had some access to one, I worked in the same computer room for weeks at the time on an off. Played with the various graphics demos, mostly. But I watched what the guys were doing with it. It was very impressive, a huge step up from anything else, and the sheer performance and memory bandwidth of the thing was one big reason I argued for getting an SGI Challenge for a later technical project. And I was right on that, as it turned out. Nothing else could do the job at the time (in this price segment, at least).
As for the CPU speed - Like the R4000, the R4400 internal pipeline ran at a higher rate (internal multiplier): https://www.cpushack.com/MIPSCPU.html
So a year later, after being rejected from art school, I used my bit of college savings to buy the SGI and Alias.
I used it for a few small video projects and animations, and then started contracting for SGI doing design work for their website. They even gave me an old Indigo to work on.
I kept both machines for about 10 years and then finally gave away them away to a collector.