Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

Err, no. SGIs were first very expensive (3D) graphics workstations and later mostly also-rans in some other markets like storage and general-purpose big servers.

Servers were Sun, x86, HP-PA, IBM R6000 RISC (and probably some more UNIX / RISC systems). Workstations were PC, Sun, Apple (mostly for graphics / design), some NeXT.

View on HN

Er, yes.

Many media companies onboarded to the web in the early 90's using SGI machines.

The Indy was a very popular multi-host system for such things. It was not a graphics powerhouse and in many low-end configurations its primary function was web serving.

(Disclaimer: I helped build the early web using SGI systems, with many major media companies as clients..)

They even had the "WebFORCE" branding with the "to author and serve" tagline! I also did a lot of early web work on an Indy, and we hosted on a Challenge!

I have a Challenge S right now, and when I got it the drive had web hosting setup for a car dealer.

There's a good series of articles on WebForce by the person at SGI who had the idea.

Starts here:

https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo...

That was a delightful read - in those days I'd already been involved in starting a major ISP, and .. burned out from that .. dove straight into the web, founding one of SoCals' first web development agencies, in that same time period - late '94 - early '95. We had brand new Indy's delivered, a contract with Prime Time Sports network and a few other Hollywood players, and .. it rocked .. until it didn't.

So it was really interesting to read the stories from the SGI side of things, straight from the source. We pushed those machines into places they didn't really belong (US Huntington Beach Womens Volleyball tournaments .. so much sand ..) and did things we shouldn't really be doing (Hi, Aleph One!), but .. so much fun.

I'll boot up my Octane2 for the memories this weekend, maybe I can still find some of the old sites we made with that clunky WebFORCE software ..

I also enjoyed that read, as a fellow SGI user.

OK, I see that an Indy went for about the same price as a SPARCstation 5 in 1993. I knew about the low-cost Indy, but not that it was that low cost (for a UNIX workstation, about $5000).

Maybe you also didn't know that it was marketed as a web server and in that capacity, was quite a bit more widely deployed than you might expect for such a machine ..

I easily spent $5000 on PC hardware in that era, just sayin’…

You could pay that much I guess, which would get you a Pentium in 1993.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com