Refurb Weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000 | Hacker News Reader

Refurb Weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000

oldvcr.blogspot.com

152 pointsBogdanp72 comments

You can use it as an SSH terminal. :)

In grad school, I ended up borrowing an old teal Indigo2, with graphics upgrade, that my research group had sitting around, to use from my dorm room, mainly as a terminal.

(I owned almost nothing in the world at the time, not even a computer, having shed my possessions in a "Gattaca" kind of way, of not saving anything for the swim back from grad school. But an SGI Indigo2 is more than powerful enough to be an SSH terminal, and my electricity use wasn't metered. And, unlike the laptops I'd borrowed, no one would want the Indigo2 back.)

Getting IRIX installed involved multiple installation tapes (or was it CD-ROMs?) that some kind person in the lab happened to still have.

An admin later offered to give me this Indigo2 that I was borrowing, but they first needed me to bring it back in for inventory. Around then, I'd finally built (or was about to build) a Linux box, and hauling the Indigo2 and its huge CRT anywhere was a chore without a car, and I'd soon be graduating, and moving away lightly. So I carted the Indigo2 back across campus, and left it for good. Hopefully it ended up with someone who preserved it, as the author here does.

Same for me circa 1993 in my uni a friend got a dumped vaxstation running Ultrix from the IT department, this was my first PC as I had no money at the time.

It had two stacked large PCB, the upper one was full of RAM chips totalling a whoping 8 MByte of RAM ;)

I used an Indy with X11 forwarding for a while, I could run a modern Firefox from my Linux machine, which worked nicely. As much as it looked like it was running natively, it really wasn't, so downloads would end up on the other computer, and sound would also play remotely. Because I never throw anything away I still have a small bunch of these machines in the attic (apart from the Indigo they are all teal though) waiting for this kind of treatment, which have been super high on my to-do list.

Well, if you’d ever be interested in lightening your collection by one for a fellow enthusiast, I’ve always wanted to get my hands on an SGI to restore/rebuild. I’m currently working on an IBM 5150+5153, but the workshop always has space for more.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s something just so mystical about SGI’s computers. I don’t know animation, and never got to work with IRIX, but at some point I want to get my hands on a Silicon Graphics computer (as well as a Sharp X86000).

In the mid-90s our CS department got a lab full of Indys, which undergrads weren't allowed to use until their 3rd year because those were the serious kit. We could only imagine how cool it would be to have Indigo2s to play with.

In about 1998 a friend gave me a Casio PDA (E-15?). It was surplus because it wasn't great, and sluggish. CPU was a close relative of the on those Indy workstations used.

In 2002 I was working for a visual effects shop in the Bay Area. Among the chaos of wires, Wacom tablets and GeForce cards in the IT bay were two large stacks of Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. The ones with the MIPS R10k CPU and fancy graphics option. We complained when we had to move them because they were so heavy, and nobody could be bothered to take them to e-waste.

When I was in college I bought an iMac G4, threw Debian on it, and used it for homework. I wrote a lot of OCaml on that thing but didn't do much web browsing because the lack of hardware graphics acceleration and 700Mhz clock made the then-modern web a bit of a struggle. Amusingly enough it did have enough horsepower to play Marathon via Aleph One - that's enough to qualify it as a Mac as far as I'm concerned :-)

SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period. They were the desire of nearly every UNIX nerd back then.

Remember "Erwin", the SGI O2 in the userfriendly.org comic? https://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1065/737/1600/user%20fri...

The comic is now dead, but it had a long and amazing run.

I still keep an SGI O2, Octane, and Fuel around for nostalgia hits nowadays, and they never disappoint:

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel_Blen...

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg

I think the irony of this is the MIPS processors weren't that good for very long at all. (Famously Toy Story was rendered on SparcStations, even if the animation was prepared on SGIs). The PA-RISC ones seemed to have the most staying power, but many people don't view HP 9000 as sexy in the way SGI was.

On the other side, turns out both Playstation (1) and Nintendo 64 did quite well for quite long.

PS2, as well. But games and game hardware tend to have very different CPU requirements than general purpose workstations.

The N64/PS1/PS2 (and others) weren’t exceptional for very long, if ever, in terms of CPU power. They relied on dedicated graphics hardware, low price, ease—of-use, a business model that allowed for selling the base hardware at a loss, and devs optimizing for a fixed platform to stay competitive for 5-10 years as PC hardware improved.

I seem to recall the CPU in the N64 was specced to be something like 75% of the performance of a Pentium 90 but for 20% of the price. The PS1 doesn't even have floating point. When the PS2 was released it felt like x86 was advancing faster than ever, so whatever impressive performance edge it had lasted for about five minutes.

In all cases it's hard to argue that MIPS devices were sold on the strength of their CPUs from the mid 90s onwards.

N64 was effectively Indy, but priced into a game console. Its devkit was an Indy (at first) even.

> N64 was effectively Indy

Not really, no. The memory system and graphics systems are completely different, and the CPU is a different MIPS processor to one in any SGI desktop. Some devkits did involve having whole subsystems on expansions in Indys though.

It should say something that when the Indy was announced the quip was "It's an Indigo without the go" so even had the N64 been Indy based it would not have been noted for CPU performance.

> I think the irony of this is the MIPS processors weren't that good for very long at all.

AFAIK SpecInt and SpecFp would like to politely dissagree. /s

Didn't PA-RISC lead MIPS, and everyone else, on those? When the already-obsolete machine being discussed in the OP was finally marketed in mid-1996, its int/fp socres of either 8/10 or 9/11 depending on the clock speed were not great compared to the available PA8000 workstations that scored 12 on SPECint95 and 17 on SPECfp95. People bought SGIs because there was some critical app they needed that was only available on IRIX, and they tolerated the bad CPU performance because they didn't have a choice.

The PA-RISC processor are really cool - the C8900 has a 64MB external shared L2, and a 768KB I & D cache per core. That's more I & D cache than any modern processor I am aware of, and more last level cache than basically anything but an AMD X3D or the last 5-10 years of X86 server chips. It's much slower of course than any modern cache.

The older 8500 has an article available with a die shot: https://ardent-tool.com/CPU/docs/MPR/19971117/111505.pdf It's like 75% cache even back then. (Fast SRAM With Integrated CPU is extremely accurate, lol).

> The PA-RISC processor are really cool

I'm glad someone else thinks so!

There's a very interesting vid about the design of the ISA here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C53tGHzp1PI and I think it's pretty clear they learned from early MIPS/Sparc. It's a shame it got abandoned in the Itanium push.

The Alpha was also a performance king in that era, but tbh I don't have the same nostalgia for it, although clearly it was executed very well.

(author) You can also count me in that list - working on a PA-RISC system was my first job out of college. I found the ISA very clean and they were strong performers. How HP got the wrong idea about VLIW, I'll never understand.

That's cool you worked on a PA-RISC system as a job! The ISA seems clean and the later superscalar designs were very advanced for their time.

I think an updated PA-RISC design be awesome for modern workloads; huge caches with prefetch, a good branch predictor + a 8-10 wide dispatch, and some sort of vector extension. A Mix of AMD Zen+X3D & Apple ARM. To be fair, ISA doesn't matter as much really these days, any core with similar features probably would perform well.

There's always someone who thinks VLIW or a similar is a good idea. So far that's been a bit tricky for a general purpose CPU, or even some parallel designs.

* 100% personal opinion, I've never actually worked on HW design directly *

> 768KB I & D cache per core

PA-RISC has mostly always had large L1 caches ( that used to be off-chip), and usually no L2 cache.

I know this bit of trivia, but I don't know the technical reasons/trade-offs for it.

Irix remains the best looking OS imo.

I too have an O2 along with some SGI flat panel screens, which was amazing tech in the world of CRT displays of yesteryear.

I've been trying to donate this stuff to local museums for a while but sadly, none seem interested. The O2 still boots without any issues, and at least one of the screens work. Shame to just throw away.

Craigslist or fb marketplace for $200 and it will be gone. Don't make it free. Compromise to $100 for the right buyer.

I'm probably just nostalgic, but to me this hardware is a piece of history that's mostly forgotten or overlooked by anyone who wasn't working in IT at the time. That's why I've been trying to get museums to take it, because my hope would be they'd do something educational with the hardware. Alas, selling is indeed probably my only recourse if I don't want these things to end up on the heap (right away.)

I was there wishing I could afford those amazing machines. My point with the pricing is to hopefully find someone who values the machine as more than a sum of its parts. Speaking of which it reminds me of the youtube channel save it for parts. Saving old tech is not very popular. We lost Living Computers: Museum + Labs after Paul Allen died.

I credit a lab full of SGIs at Ohio State with my transition from a career in mechanical engineering towards technology and information security. I just got transfixed by all of the things I could do and would spend my time in class distributing povray renders across the whole lab instead of paying attention to what I was supposed to be doing.

We also had a gorgeous lab of NeXT computers in a basement computer lab. Between just doing what seemed like magic in Mathematica and seeing how small I could make fonts on the laser printer, I also got scolded directly by Steve Jobs by replying to his default email in the mail client with 'read receipt' enabled. He said it was a violation of his privacy lol.

Edit: This was the email - https://blog.hayman.net/2025/05/06/from-steve-jobs-great-ide...

> https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg

Thanks for posting this; never seen that particular model before. It looks like one of those kitschy, pad-supplied coffee or soda makers. I find the urge, very prevalent from the mid-90s to the mid-Aughts, to entomb even professional-grade electronics in cases that look like cheap toys or other household appliances both bizarre and fascinating, analog to the 70s trend of styling (especially home) computing devices as faux-wooden furniture pieces, et cetera.

> SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period.

Back in the 90s my best friend's stepfather happened to be the top dog of SGI Benelux (Belgium / The Netherlands / Luxembourg) so... My best friend had an SGI Indy (Indy, not Indygo) at home.

After school we'd go back to his place and have fun with the Indy. That thing already had a webcam (in, what, 1993?).

I remember a 3D demo of oil pipelines, some crazy music video with little balls bouncing on top of sound waves and... the terminal. I learned my very first Un*x command on that thing.

One one hand we had Commodore Amiga and games nearly as good as the arcade and on the other hand we had the Indy.

We of course also had our mediocre beige PC with an even more mediocre OS: DOS and then Windows.

Thankfully a few years late Linux came out and saved us from mediocrity.

I too keep an O2 (actually more than one), Octane, and a Fuel around. Plus an Indy or two.

I worked vfx on teal Indigo2 at the time and then max impact purple one.. later on Octane, Octane2, etc.

BUT, this second generation of SGIs felt special. Ok a third gen, but the first one in beige boxes does not count. Crimson in gen before was also special.

Years later I was given a machine I worked on, since I'm in retro machines and game and all and to my disappointment it was the purple one, not teal (teal got lost somewhere). Now, imagine that since purple one is vastly superior to teal one, hah. Got indy along with it, webcam and all to be web ready!

I only skimmed through article for now, but is there a specific reason you haven't went with period-correct IRIX 5.x and went with 6? On a side note, SD2SCSI or similar to get rid of the spinning rust? And ultimate question, what do we all do with power supplies? They will die.

(author) Just because I'm used to 6.5, no other reason particularly. Any of the SCSI emulators are generally fine but I now gravitate to the ones that let you run multiple devices from image files because that makes it very easy to do backups. Here I used a ZuluSCSI, which is also one of the ones where if you have an existing drive, it will clone it for you in initiator mode.

The power supplies are a bigger question, but some work has been done on this already with other systems, notably the Fuel. There is at least a way to repair the Impact supplies' caps, though that's not all that can go wrong. I expect we'll eventually see conversion kits for these other big systems at some stage.

I'm also on 6.5, I don't remember the details anymore but I remember that at the time I considered 6.5 way better than 5.x and never looked back after I upgraded.

Really liked your post, the way you brought that old Indigo back to life was super fun to read. I totally agree that the magic is in seeing the machine actually run again, not just sitting on a shelf. For me, I’ve messed with a couple of old PCs before, but nothing as cool as an SGI box. Reading this makes me think I should try grabbing one if I ever spot it cheap. Thanks for sharing the journey—would love to see more pics of the messy steps too, not just the polished result. Feels like hanging out with a fellow retro nerd.

Author here - thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed it.

In the article you mentioned the Indy having a T1 interface. I only remembered having ISDN as an option on them, with the use case being that ISDN was pretty easily orderable for people working from home or branch offices and needing to get online with it. T1s were still exotic, expensive and not available in a lot of places. Do you have a T1 card for an Indy? I'd love to see that! Do you know what the intention of that was?

No, no, I had a thinko when I wrote that. The Indy had a ISDN port. Thanks for spotting the error.

TIL "thinko". Thank you.

Where was this machine made?

I was using these in the UK at the time and ours were 'Made in Switzerland', which I liked.

You mention the Crimson in the article, another machine I knew in period. I was showing someone around one day and they rudely said that it was a 'very large box for a single CPU'.

My introduction to SGI was the Indigo and I usually had whatever was latest until I had O2s and a massive Onyx2 with Infinite Reality3. No machines have had the impressive presence that these machines had in period. Although nice hardware has came out since then, nothing just makes civilians drop their jaws in awe and wonder.

By analogy, it is like the difference between one of those vast organs that you get in cathedrals and the synthesisers you get in a music shop. Musicians would probably prefer the latter, but normies like me just don't get that wow feeling.

Although newer machines were better, I always felt that something was compromised each time. For example, the wonderful OG keyboards and ALPS mice, they got a little bit creaky and plastic over time. It was also the same with cases. I appreciated the design goals of O2 but it was very creaky and there was not the usual choice of video breakout boxes with genloc and all those fun things that we had back then.

For reference, my Onyx had 256Mb of RAM and 64Mb of graphics RAM, if I can remember correctly. This was less than the 384Mb I had in Indigo2 machines, which we had to boost due to a software memory leak just to get the runtime. This level of RAM was huge in period (when office PCs had 32K of video RAM, if you were lucky) and yet today a single tab running YouTube will take more than a gig of RAM.

I would like a mini-museum of SGI machines, however, without the hardware specific applications that I used these machines for, I feel that it would be a case of 'never meet your heroes'.

(author) Rear panel on this one says "Made in USA."

I suspect your dismissive coworker didn't realize everything else inside a Crimson. I just wish I had the space for one, even though I'd be using the workstations more.

No machines have had the impressive presence that these machines had in period. Although nice hardware has came out since then, nothing just makes civilians drop their jaws in awe and wonder.

Eh, I don't know about that. The Onyx2 looks like a dorm fridge that also makes espresso. Meanwhile, here's Seymour Cray, inviting you to have a seat on his couch...

> The Onyx2 looks like a dorm fridge that also makes espresso.

It was the Indigo that made espresso. :)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SGI_Espressigo

https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconGraphics/comments/1eh9puu/sg...

Not bad. First time I see this but no surprise, as the SGI case design is much more suitable as an Espresso machine. Now you only need the aptly named SGI Fuel juice maker and a Luigi-themed N64 toaster for the ultimate IMPACT breakfast. :p

I wanted one of these so bad as a kid. Obviously the mystique was supercharged by their use in VFX, and how filmmakers would sneak them into various shots in movies. Wrote to SGI and they sent some brochures including for this machine. Printed on beautiful heavy stock. Very sad I lost it over the years.

What's amazing is how companies would invest in a whole fleet of these. You'd hear about this or that game development company ordering one for everyone on their team for a cool million or ten. In 90s dollars.

90s were a fun time in computing.

Nothing beats the SGI desktop.

Their cases were designed in those days. Today all computers look the same.

I mean the desktop on the monitor screen. Not the case.

Web browsers should have been based on ButtonFly.

Most beat it, e. g. the aesthetically much superior UI of the Canon Cat, which one can admire on the same website. Aside from that, many SGI computer cases look tacky, sort of like the N64 of the computer world; they also remind me a bit of Colani's case designs. Well, at least the guts were/are impressive.

Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine. Among workstations SGI was light years ahead - the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.

> Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine.

Equation (as opposed to comparison) and preference are two very different things, friend. And yes, I'm one of those weirdos who prefers minimal, low-color, high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs and TUIs to, say, SGIs offerings. Like the Canon Cat's and many others. We'll both live.

> [...] the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.

The GUI is not as grotten ugly to me as those from most modern offerings, or certain vintage offenders, e. g. early-to-mid Workbench, Windows XP (excluding the Classic Theme), I'll give you that. But it certainly doesn't knock me out of my socks.

> high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs

The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.

> The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.

The criticism, "implications" (i. e. your speculations) aside, is that based on the screenshots of the desktop I've seen it's just not enough for me. Not even close.

But since I've never used an SGI workstation, I am indeed largely ignorant of its "hidden" UI/UX qualities. And who knows? Maybe you can pimp the desktop's visual design enough that even I fall in love with it.

Your claims are IRIX is not "high res" and not "angular/facetted", both of which are objectively ludicrous, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

> But since I've never used an SGI workstation

Evidently.

Weird comment. They stood out positively in a world where literally everything was beige.

I fucking love beige! Besides, there were many non-beige PCs on the market, especially outside of the US. And no SGI workstation ever had the coolness factor of something like the all-black, pyramid-styled Meadata Systems/Technologies "Snofru" 386 workstation from 1989 (which might've been just a Tradeshow Special).

Pics ?

> Tja... that's the problem; images are almost nonexistant. Before today, I've only seen this particular machine in two German computer magazines.

The first source is the December 1989 issue of the Happy Computer, containing a report from the Munich tradeshow "Systems", which took place from 16th to 20th October 1989. You'll find a picture of the Snofru on pages 124 and 125. According to the description, its guts are a 386 with 25 MHz, 4 MB RAM, and an 80 MB HDD (12 ms). 1989 price: 35,000 DM. Meadata Technologies was a Munich outfit. Here, the machine is shown in a gold or sandy taupe livery. [1/2]

There is at least one other German magazine which reported on this very machine; it think it was the c't. Oddly enough, they showed a very small picture of an all-black machine. But maybe I just misremembered; I have to look that up. [3]

[1] Magazine online-view here: [https://reader.kultmags.com/Happy%20Computer%201989-12]

[2] Direct download of the archived mag here: [https://kultmags.com/Happy%20Computer/1989/Happy%20Computer%...]

[3] EDIT: After checking my archive I see I didn't misremember. The December 1989 issue of the c't has a picture of the Snofru on page 18. The styling is all-black with some red highlights. It also goes into a bit more detail on the specs: Intel motherboard, 64 KByte cache, 4 MByte RAM standard (expandable to 24 MByte; the below-referenced DOS International also mentions RAM expansion cards), a Plus (a Quantum subsidiary) Impulse hard disk system with a maximum of two internal HDDs (80 MB options were offered), as well as two controllers for connecting external storage for a combined maximum of ca. 2.6 GByte. Graphics card is a Video Seven. The PSU was located in the the top of the pyramid and has an "allegedly" very quiet fan, which was embedded in a dampening enclosure made of rubber. The envisioned application of the machine was to be that of a fast, networked file server.

[4] EDIT 2: The December '89 issue of DOS International IDs the machine as "Snofru XXV" and shows two small pictures: the all-black version on page 6, and a seethrough illustration on page 8. The magazine can be found here: [https://kultmags.com/DOS%20International/1989/DOS%20Internat...]. The text also makes note of "confidential" impartiations relating to orders by "high-ranking managers" of "well-known banks".

[5] Finnish mag Bitti shows the all-black machine on page 23 of issue 9/90 as well (photo repro only in bw). Price: 87,400 Suomen markka.

> I fucking love beige!

I'm going to consider my suspicion you were just trolling confirmed.

Ahaha, no. You're conversing with someone who grew up in one of the grayest places in the known universe (an East German city) and considers himself allergic to many (novelty) color schemes and combinations of this world; most beiges, off-whites, and grays OTOH are are beautiful (and relaxing) to me. This, of course, manifests in certain biases with regards to all things industrial design, e. g. case desgns, UIs, and so on.

Dunno. I worked (fortunately only) very briefly on one (Octane I _think_). Still remember the trashcan were flames shot out, when one was dragging a file on it. Cute the first three times. Other than that, I remember the bad flicker (in Europe 50Hz only!) of the (large, then) colour monitor and the noise. Oh, the noise. Fellow users tried to mitigate it by hiding it behind the door to the server room to little effect. I'm sure it's performance as graphics workstation were outstanding (which I had no use for then), but the ergonomics were just awful.

what do you mean “60Hz only”, I don’t recall touching anything before 2012 that had higher refresh rates in an office.

Heck, even now most business equipment (even the art calibrated ones) are 60Hz…

Have you used CRT monitors? Some of those could do over 120 Hz. Anything below 85 Hz was painful to look at for a longer period of time for most people.

Yup I had a Sony Trinitron CRT monitor with ~75-85hz refresh rate in like 1998.

Quite interesting read, like many on those days, I really looked up for SGI, and visited regularly their site due to them being the host for original C++ STL documentation.

Will always have a soft spot for Indigo2 10k.

Interesting to see an old Unix box with EISA slots .. I would have thought that was "too PC".

I yearn for the day of when we go back to tower cases running obscure operating systems.

Incredible labor of love, well done! It’s also a fun machine to play with OpenGL.

I’m surprised OpenOffice is that old - existing simultaneously with Netscape… somehow I thought it was a late-2000s situation.

Ah, brings back memories of being a Silicon Graphics Customer Support Engineer based in London and the Home Counties, back in the late 90's and early 2000's.

Indy, Indigo, then later the Octanes, and others I can't quite remember the name of off-hand.

The video post-production companies in SOHO - I saw the CGI being rendered for Event Horizon...

The "IBM Stiction Problem" as it was called. Batches of IBM hard drives that worked fine for months - right up until the machines were powered off - which then entailed an on-site visit. The stifled gasp from the customer as I remove the old drive and give it a stern tap on the desk, to get it unstuck so I could clone it to the replacement. ;)

Enjoyed that job immensely, except for the driving around London bit.

It runs Doom ==> system qualified.

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