I actually have two SGI machines kicking around (an Indigo2 and an Octane2), and I really wish I had a better idea of what to do with them beyond poking around at the desktop for 10 minutes.
One big problem with all these old "workstation" computers, is that while us hobbyists still have our ways of getting the OS installed... The actual applications people ran on them almost seem lost to time. When software is so unbelievably expensive during its heyday, it tends to not make the jump over to "abandonware" repositories once its time has passed. This unfortunately makes demos of these old machines far more boring than demos of old PCs.
I think CATIA V4 (CAD software) was big on SGI - at least that's what I used an Indy for back in the day. I believe V4 didn't run on the PC, so you needed a workstation anyway. Don't know if one can find a copy anywhere but I think it would be fun to use it again. It was solid software with a good UI, quite different from CATIA V5 which (also) ran on the PC and had a very colorful and noisy UI.
EDIT: After googling SGI workstation models I think what I used was actually most likely an O2[1]. Great design, I remembered its distinct look even after so many years.
Heh, I was doing CAD workstation support about 15 years ago, when there was the big switch between CATIA V4 and V5. SGIs were mostly Octanes plus a few bigger irons, I think, but it also ran on HP-UX and some Sun workstations.
There wasn't a lot of movement in the 3D workstation space at the time, whereas PC 3D accelerators were taking off big time. So you ended up with a system that was faster, a lot cheaper and where the regular PC maintenance software and infrastructure could be used (boy, homogenous Unix devops was a nightmare).
Having said that, CATIA was more a workhorse CAD and CAE software, so probably not the best to show off neat UIs, and amongst engineers it had a somewhat ponderous reputation.
I ran similar and built up some pretty big systems.
Some software, made on IRIX, like Alias and I-DEAS did show it all off. Other apps ran great, but did their own thing no matter what UNIX you were on. Then again, some of those interfaces were amazing in their own way. I would count CATIA R5 in that group for sure.
This fits with my experience and I agree that CATIA V4 UI isn't the most exciting. It is solid though and something many people spent 9 to 5, 200+ d/y with, so I thought it could be interesting for octorian to experience what working with these machines really felt like back in the day.
You probably have zero chance of getting your hands on the software, but in the late 90s TV ststions ran their weather graphics off of SGI workstations with some software based in part on something called Inventor. The software was incredibly easy to use for building 3D animations, which were baked to video with built-in loops and pauses for the weather segment.
If your meteorologist didn't want to hold a remote, the weather producer would have to sit in front of the workstation with their hand over the spacebar waiting for the right cues to advance to the next loop/pause point.
If your meteorologist didn't want to hold a remote, the weather producer would have to sit in front of the workstation with their hand over the spacebar waiting for the right cues to advance to the next loop/pause point.
At some stations, it wasn't about the talent not wanting to hold the remote, it was about the station not having an engineer on staff who could rig up the remote.
At many stations in the 90's, and even some today, the "remote" is nothing fancier than a garage door opener, with the relays hooked into a breakout box to a DB25 serial port.
I did a lot of development sitting in front of my IBM 43p with it's Intergraph monitor and model M keyboard (not original). All I needed was to ssh into my Linux machine and run the software over the network. The responsiveness, however, will be mostly gone in this scenario - X doesn't come for free.
These machines are excruciatingly slow by today's standards and I wouldn't want to run modern software on them. Still, they are the dinosaurs of the PC ecosystem - evolutionary dead-ends that hint at what could be. Who wouldn't want to study a living dinosaur?
There was a graphical programming language for SGIs called AVS. I saw impressive scientific applications made with it: elaborate physics simulations with 3D graphics. The language and the applications seem to be completely forgotten.
This page about AVS is dated 1995 and cites a 1989 paper:
Almost all of the software worth preserving is preserved. It may not be openly available (though odds are it will eventually be dumped openly on the net) but you can find pretty much anything you want if you put in some effort. It comes down to you getting access to one of many private repositories that are dedicated to software preservation.
Yes. I regret it a little, but I worked in the industry having access to a lot of big software.
Piled up a bunker of Sgi machines, O2, Octane, Indigo, Indy, most very well equipped with the advanced memory and graphics options.
Alias, I-deas, Maya, Adobe, 3DS Max... Let's just say I could license most of that at will due to an error...
Learned a ton of high end skills that I benefit from today too. Great fun. And amazing demos. Putting those together was a total blast. People would get blown away using Showcase, the Sgi tools for video capture, audio, and Composer to mix, RIP, burn. This was mid 90's when most people were using Win 98, or maybe NT 3.5.1
Let's also say I got rid of said error (so don't ask) and gave the whole lot away to a 20 something me just itching for those same experiences. Those machines were well loved and used. Cool.
I needed a change away from that kind of computing as it went on the wane. Didn't want to look back.
But at the peak? I was very seriously productive on Irix. The Indigo Magic Desktop took everything I ever threw at it.
And one could flat out bury those machines with a heavy workload and still the UX was golden, responsive almost as if idle!
At one point, at some conference, the head scientist at Sgi said, "We turn compute problems into I/O problems."
How the machines performed showed that ethos off well, IMHO.
Honestly, today on say, Win 10, I can do all I did then on a laptop, but not enjoy it as much as I did that environment. It is responsive and fun!
Big software on Irix remains one of the peak computing experiences I have had. Damn good times.
I may have to put this on a Linux install and have some fun.
In my view, the Irix scheduler is insane good at balancing UX with workloads. It may not always be the peak possible throughput, but a skilled user can continue to blast through their tasks pretty much no matter what the OS load is.
On a lark, I got to try an extreme example of that:
Irix 5.3 on an Indigo Elan, 30Mhz CPU. I forget which one. I want to say R3k. (Check Ian's SGI Depot for more info)
I compiled "amp", which is an optimized mp3 player that formed the basis of many players after it was written.
At 30 Mhz, that Indigo Elan could play up to 192Mbps mp3 files, over NFS, while the desktop remained responsive.
At 256Mbps, CPU load was about 95 percent. Would glitch on occasion.
I found that quite impressive personally. I used that little Elan as a X terminal for a while and it was a pleasure to use.
...ah, Sgi.
Damn. Say what you want, their stuff was fun, had amazing docs, and got work done.
[Looks at Android / Win 10]
Meh.
That's part of why I scaled down. Unloaded that gear and went small, embedded retro for my fun computing. The work is easier today, and fine by me, because it is just work.
I hate to say it, but that's even more useless than a vanilla IRIX installation. By far.
One big problem with running a 3rd party OS on these old machines (specifically SGI, Sun doesn't have this issue) is that they tend to not really support any of the hardware that actually makes these machines interesting.
I have some old machines too, and that thought occurs. But that is also slightly boring. What can I do on those that I can't do on amd64 at higher speeds?
Porting and hacking on low level stuff is probably the most interesting thing I can think of for it. That is probably why I keep the machines around. In practice though I hardly have the time to use them.
Porting software to unexpected environments sometimes exposes legit bugs and validates your design. I always like to get software I write working in unusual configurations. It tests my assumptions and often results in something sturdier.
It has nothing todo with speed, but finding bug's.
>I always recommend developers to get the cheapest possible laptop for testing.
Yeah that is stupid, until you are the developer of that Laptop, or your dev's have too much time, take trusty Hardware and Down-clock it if you need to (you don't want to debug cheap hardware).
If you want to find bugs in your code that arise from assumptions about machine architecture, you can use emulators. You don't need an ancient MIPS machine for that, unless you want to find bugs on code that supports long obsolete hardware. And you can emulate architectures far weirder than MIPS with that.
And you should test on slow and unreliable hardware. You'd be surprised, for instance, how frequently servers fail to boot because the BMC ignored your instructions.
>from assumptions about machine architecture, you can use emulators
That is exactly NOT true, since there is no 100% correct emulation around, think of x64 emulation with integrated Meltdown, if you don't know about meltdown your emulation has no implementation for it.
Look you made a perfect counterargument, using unreliable hardware...with your words you could just test it with unreliable emulation ;)
>unreliable hardware... how frequently servers
Wait...server's and unreliable do not match together...and then the BMC argument..sound's bit crazy to me.
I use that machine for what i want to use it, i also use my C64 as a Webserver and my Leemote-Laptop as my Mainbackup.
Better having Hardware you can use for something then not...and you know, you can reinstall Irix later if you want.
One big problem with all these old "workstation" computers, is that while us hobbyists still have our ways of getting the OS installed... The actual applications people ran on them almost seem lost to time. When software is so unbelievably expensive during its heyday, it tends to not make the jump over to "abandonware" repositories once its time has passed. This unfortunately makes demos of these old machines far more boring than demos of old PCs.