Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 Workstation [video] | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 Workstation [video]

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I used an Indigo2 with a pair of 21" Sony 13w3 monitors (one rebadged as Sun, one as CGI) as my desktop for a couple years.

When I finally had reason to swap it out for a more normal system, it went down to London to become a CPAN testers smoke testing machine until the hardware finally gave out.

Fantastic piece of kit. I especially liked that when we had a few weeks of power blips if I came home to see 'power brownout detected' as a console log entry (it always survived them fine itself) that was a useful indicator to go through all my x86 kit and bring the casualties back up.

What graphics option did you have? Two 13W3 outputs?

you can do two solid/high impact boards on indigo 2. each will be a separate X display

I can't even imagine how awesome that would have been. Honestly.

That was in ... '04 ish? And, yes, it was indeed awesome.

As with all my desktops since time immemorial, its purpose was to provide an X11 environment that I used to ssh to everything else, so I never really stressed the machine itself.

This isn't (I think, memory fuzzy at this remove) a screenshot from that box, but it'll give you a feel for what one of my monitors would be displaying - https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg

Zero use of any of the shiny, just treating it as a solid old school workstation - the closest I had to a complaint was that it took me a little while to adjust to the level of fan noise.

With a remote browser instance to deal with the billion tons of JS I wouldn't at all mind going back to that setup today.

But it served valiantly in its subsequent life, so I feel I treated it with the respect it deserved.

(also because nobody really cared about that sort of kit at the time the Indigo2 and the monitors were cheap pickups off ebay, I'm not sure I've ever had better "bang for the buck" from building out a work setup)

These things were so awesome back in the 90s. I got to use quite a few of them and even owned a couple in the early 2000s as they were being thrown away.

It always blew my mind that systems like SGI and SUN existed and yet somehow windows was allegedly cutting edge.

Linux or Windows NT combined with gpu companies like Nvdia ate into everything that made SGI successful.

As a geek, I miss exotic Unix hardware with their shapes, colors, and RISC chips. As a nerd, who needs that when AMD64 and Nvdia get the job done.

I once had a magical collection of chips from old Unix workstations - dec alphas and vax, dig and sun. I was responsible for cleaning out a large storage room of computers from the 70s-90s and I pulled all the processors I could because they were amazing objects to look at.

I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.

I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time in the end.

It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI’s around the edges.

But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux. There was just no competition and as much as I loved the legacy Unix stuff it wasn’t as nice or as easy to run as open source alternatives.

I’m glad I got to play in that world though.

> I’m glad I got to play in that world though.

What made it so exciting? Was it just the novelty aspect of having different flavors, architecture, and environments?

For me it was the diversity. Even though the machines themselves were similar, some did some things a lot better than the others. Some had ridiculously fast disk IO (the Suns, usually), some had silky smooth mouse movements (the SGIs), and so on. Also, there were the different GUIs - I loved Sun’s OpenWindows - and SGIs could use better font smoothing (but only NeXT was doing that back then).

I’m not sure it was a much considered cutting edge rather it was considered cost effective. 99.99% of office workers did not need this kind of workstation, windows systems were cheaper and became ubiquitous.

Oh I agree.

I mainly meant “to the general public” this (windows 98) was cutting edge.

Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.

It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.

I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3 windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac just worked.

The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them anytime one broke I’d just boot a Linux CD and use “nc” and “dd” to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user just thought I’d fixed their computer.

It was a fun time.

> Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.

It wasn’t even very convenient to read e-mails. GUI e—mail programs were not up to the Eudora level on those machines. And heaven forbid you needing a spreadsheet.

By 1999/2001 I think you already had Star office.

And KDE1 for sure. But these were the very last years of the SGI machines.

Maybe, but I don’t remember IRIX binaries.

By 2001 it was this, but it was very late for Irix:

https://www.openoffice.org/porting/irix/

Also, I forgot. By 1995 and beyond I'm pretty sure Netscape and such existed for Irix.

https://ftp.jurassic.nl/pub/irix/netscape/

This is funny because in the 90s I was at a similar position. I was at a university department where everybody had a Solaris 2.3 or 2.4 box as well as a PC that would dual boot into OS/2 or a 5MB MSDOS partition. Solaris, OS/2 and MSDOS would all mount the users' homedirectory from the SunOS 4.1.3 box, either via NFS or Samba.

People sadly did most of their work by booting into MSDOS and then loading Windows 3.1 from a shared readonly Sambashare that had Windows, Office and a ton of other programs ready to use. This "immutable" Windows installation worked surprisingly well as Windows no longer could destroy itself by existing and reconfiguring itself, and users could no longer run setup.exe for unneeded programs that would break everything else.

They were super expensive, and even if IrisGL was a great achievement, there are many ways to put pixels on the screen.

Windows NT - the OS to run on comparable computers - was cutting edge, and still is in many ways. Don't be fooled by the similarly named products made for 100x less powerful computers.

What computers that ran NT in the 90's were "100x more powerful" than UNIX workstations, exactly?

What I think they were saying was that NT and Unix workstations were peers (running on "comparable computers"), and that NT shouldn't be conflated with 9x ("similarly named products"), which had to run well on much more modest ("100x less powerful") hardware than the aforementioned.

Indeed

NT and intel didn't catch up SGI/Mips and Dec/Alpha until the Pentium III, and in the case of the Alpha, even the 800MHZ one was subpar against the Alpha.

NT ran on DEC Alpha.

True; but software wise Linux and BSD curb-stomped anything NT could offer.

And MIPS too.

We used these to make Crash Bandicoot and we even had a mode where you could run on the game on the SGI. It was ... sort of ... playable.

It makes sense - SGIs and PlayStations were all MIPS back then.

Ditto with the N64. I think there's a WIP backport of Super Mario 64 for Irix 6 by reusing the decomp and the PC source port. The PC one can run under GL 1.3 and GLIDE, nothing fancy.

I’m sure all five users will be ecstatic. ;-)

As a longhaired teenager, I rarely got the chance to physically touch these things (although it did happen a couple times). Mostly I remember telnetting into a machine, noticing that it was Irix, and being able to login as "4Dgifts" without a password for a root shell. The joy was short-lived though, because as soon as you tried to build software (regardless of how "portable" the package was), you ran into interesting problems, if the compilers were even installed. I eventually got to spend several days with a Webforce Indy and its fancy (what we would now call a) webcam, where I took my first-ever selfie in 1995 and made my peace with the dev environment. These lil things were definitely ahead of their time, even if their price tags weren't.

The 90s SGI machines were great, for graphics, but it is mystifying how many people used them as standard workstations given things like Suns had better CPUs. Toy Story was designed on SGIs and rendered on Suns for a reason after all.

The great oddity of SGIs was the multimedia peripherals worked properly, and this is the bit of the experience the NT and Linux replacements never quite managed.

I bought one when I started an ISP, could have used intel with Linux but Linux was very very new. After the ISP was acquired (just the customers, not the hardware) I had the Indy in my apartment for a bit, but someone really wanted it and I was able to sell it for decent change.

Did anyone else notice that they made strange clicking sounds?

My first ISP environment back in '00 was a mixture of FreeBSD and BSDi, though we did eventually acquire a Mandrake box to trial linux on.

This was '94/95, Linux was an option but _just_ barely....

Spinning drive noises?

I always assumed the click was the drive but never knew. The rhythm reminded me of the old 70's Battlestar Galactica Cylon eyes. It was a weird, slow click.

Surprisingly entertaining video. It was on a workstation similar to this one that I first used the Mosaic web browser circa 1993. Strangely, the first web site I visited featured a picture of Al Gore (not making this up) then US VP. I cannot find a reference to that web site anywhere or what content it may have contained. Does anyone else remember this?

It might've been the original whitehouse.gov, which was a fairly early Web server (before they were called "sites").

This archive is from later (IIRC, HTML table layout wasn't yet used in 1993): https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/

Reportedly, whitehouse.gov was implemented in Common Lisp. (This was before the dotcom gold rush, so a lot of Web stuff was done by fringe Internet/computer uber-nerds -- mostly "this is interesting", and not usually "this pays money".)

> whitehouse.gov

Not all. The publications distribution feature was implement in Common Lisp.

> so a lot of Web stuff was done by fringe Internet/computer uber-nerds

That part was actually done by a team from MIT.

A lot of my early web projects were written in C. Everyone else seemed to be using perl. Doing a lot of string stuff in C was annoying.

In Perl it was less annoying, but I agree - C doesn’t really have strings in any convenient sense.

No TCL/Tk?

In probably 1999, I had a borrowed old Indigo 2 (probably with IMPACT graphics) in my dorm room... used only as a generic general-purpose Unix workstation, not for 3D.

I replaced it with a modest Linux box, which was much more practical (Celeron 500MHz, 128MB RAM, basic Matrox G200 graphics, non-fruit-colored case): https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/

I used to idolise SGI when I was in high school. It was a highlight every time I got to play with one, in college and at computer fairs. When I finally got one practically for myself at a workplace, they were being overtaken by cheaper high-end PCs.

I've got an empty purple case from an Indigo². I had planned to build a graphics PC workstation inside but found that it was difficult to fit a modern cooling solution inside, being only 120 mm thick — on the outside. I'm hoping to find a reasonably powerful RISC-V computer to put in it instead in a not too distant future: only because the ISA has some of MIPS' legacy.

I used to have that same ViewSonic monitor used in the video for some time and I think I just recycled it. Mixed feelings seeing someone actually wanting to use one ;)

SGI's workstations were super cool. I think I saw one or two in action but never got to actually use one. Another cool graphics workstation from that period was IBM's RS/6000, I remember seeing a demo of Catia running on that and it blew my mind.

I'm curious how current day GPU architecture traces its heritage to earlier 3d acceleration if at all. IIRC 3d hardware at the day was about rendering shaded triangles + Z buffer.

The Indigo2 Impact MGRAS graphic card hissed loudly when working :) That was the time... I don't have an Indigo2, but I'll keep my Indy and my Octane.

On thing of wonder in the video is that the front door is apparently intact. It's broken on almost all Indigo2...

Here are some pictures of the SGI '97 prices booklet :

https://diasp.eu/uploads/images/d91a9e38cc4233b5ff7b.jpg

https://diasp.eu/uploads/images/7b95d346ff8b785a61f2.jpg

https://diasp.eu/uploads/images/d7e776faba446ea35670.jpg

I love these work stations. Many (15+) years ago I used an Indy like a sort of dumb terminal, using X forwarding. It was very cool to use an application like a modern Firefox on such an old Unix installation even if it really ran remotely. It worked quite well remoting from a modern Ubuntu computer. I still have the Indy (and a small assortment of other old SGI machines, including 2 Indigo 2s), reviving these machines is on my bucket/todo list. This video sure makes me want to grab one (the Indigo mostly) and get all nerdy. Would love to see more!

Today you have a modern Dillo fork (the one from Github) from the ex-Nekochan guys.

I used to go daily into SGI developer pages, as they had nice documentation for C++, including the HP STL libraries (the original implementation for the STL proposal being discussed for ISO C++98).

I also had the opinion that the real cool 3D API was OpenInventor, not OpenGL, in a way true, as every engine ends up building their own scene graph from scratch.

One of the few UNIXes that was really cool to use.

One of the great tragedies is that Fahrenheit never got off the ground. OpenInventor on top of DirectX as a standard... would have been sweet.

I got to use one of these when I worked at printer. It ran EFI Fiery and was probably overkill for RIPing printing plates with a laser etcher.

There was at least one RIP company (name forgotten) that repackaged SGI machines with their software as single purpose devices. That was definitely a thing for a while.

For those unfamiliar a RIP took postscript input and spits out very high resolution black/white images for each separate ink, factoring in all the halftone generation etc.

Management Graphics. It could drive two Canon Color Copiers and up to three Encad NovaJet wide format inkjet printers.

Management Graphics was known for their slide printers (and why they developed the RIP in the first place); I was just happy to see one of their RIPs could replace the horrible EFI RIPs that the Canon copiers came with as well as handle our new NoveJet printers. Good times! Oh yeah, Management Graphics bundled it with a sheet feed densitometer - no more hand scanning dozens of color blocks to calibrate each morning/afternoon.

It was called Jet Stream! Really hard to find stuff from the pre-internet days online. Yikes!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/375054255578

In the summers of 93 and 94 I had an internship where my daily desktop was an Indigo 2 Extreme, because someone had procured it, but no one was using it. Crazy.

I did do some awesome graphics visualizations of the labs simulation data on it, so I think they got some use of it, but I also played a lot of Arena...

I usually do not watch videos, but this one was very nice.

In the mid 90s, I had been working on an SGI Indigo for a couple of years (3d post facility in London). We were in line for a hardware upgrade, and my junior colleague wanted us to switch to a Windows PC setup. From price / performance, it was hard to argue against it. I loved SGI hardware though, it was sad it fell by the wayside somewhat.

Awesome to see the Indigo2 mentioned. Very fond of these machines, but it was also the first system I led the OS development for. Machines were simple then, just a few people to do the work. Last system before I retired was Grace Hopper/Blackwell. Complexity change over 30 years is amazing.

Those were such nice machines. Good graphics, good processors, good memory, good OS. They were a joy to work on.

Did anyone else play BZFlag on them?

"Building a better dinosaur" was their slogan after Jurrasic Park. SGI used to be cool.

Great memories of teenage years exploring Irix' extensive opereating system, and the countless command line utilities shipped with it.

Some of these were truly works of art, especially compared to the Linux counterparts of the same period (if they even existed).

Worked at a VFX company in the 90s and had Origins and Onyx to share and an O2 on my desk. Didn’t fully realize at the time we we living twenty years in the future. My ~2015 Lintel was messier but similar.

BTW tons of Gopher users from SDF (gopher://sdf.org , use the search option at Veronica) have screenshots and daily usage of SGI machines with modern software ported into Irix.

For those that are looking, I have one of these to sell.

Drop me a line or schedule a meet: https://srdjan.pro

Oh an old “Indy without the go.”

The Indy was an Indigo without the go.

>"Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes (?)

From the infamous leaked "Software Usability II" email, October 5, 1993, by Tom Davis.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...

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