My new POWER Indigo 2
The author restored a rare Silicon Graphics POWER Indigo 2 workstation, originally priced at £30,000, successfully booting it with the IRIX 6.2 operating system and plans to explore its capabilities further.
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The blog post details the author's acquisition and restoration journey of a rare Silicon Graphics POWER Indigo 2 workstation from 1995. The author connected with a community member, Kestral, to obtain the machine during the Retro Computer Festival at the Centre for Computing History. The Indigo 2, particularly notable for its MIPS R8000 CPU module, was originally priced around £30,000 and is now a sought-after collector's item. The author describes the internal components, including the absence of drives and RAM, and the challenges of sourcing these parts. After acquiring necessary components, the author successfully booted the machine, showcasing its advanced features for the time, such as a graphical boot interface. The author expresses enthusiasm for the machine's performance and usability, particularly with the IRIX 6.2 operating system, and plans to continue exploring its capabilities.
- The author acquired a rare Silicon Graphics POWER Indigo 2 workstation.
- The machine features a MIPS R8000 CPU and was originally priced around £30,000.
- The author successfully booted the workstation after sourcing necessary components.
- The Indigo 2 runs the IRIX 6.2 operating system, showcasing advanced graphical capabilities.
- The author expresses excitement about the machine's performance and plans for further exploration.
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- Many commenters reminisce about the distinctive aesthetics of SGI machines compared to generic computers of the time.
- There is a shared recognition of the high costs associated with SGI workstations and their software, which were justified by the specialized skills they enabled.
- Several users recall their personal experiences with SGI systems, emphasizing their reliability and the unique challenges they presented.
- Commenters note the evolution of 3D graphics and modeling software, contrasting the past exclusivity with today's accessibility.
- There is a general appreciation for the engineering and design of SGI machines, with some expressing a desire to own similar vintage hardware today.
14 commentsAnd then you had to buy the software. A license for a 3D modeling package like Softimage or Alias cost at least $10-15k, and you probably also needed a separate raytracing package for high-quality output.
Someone is selling a copy of Alias for SGI for $2500 on eBay today: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335622694059
But if, in 1994, you did have an SGI and Alias and enough artistic skill and technical competence (and patience…) to produce liquid logos and dancing soda bottles and face morphs, you would certainly recoup that $80k investment quickly. It was a very rare skill that needed very rare hardware. You could get highly paid freelance work by simply calling up ad agencies.
That scarcity a bit hard to imagine today, when anyone can download Blender onto their standard desktop computer and learn it by watching online videos. It’s cool that 3D art has been thoroughly democratized.
They were so expensive they only made sense to run 24/7/365 in order to get their money’s worth. They had a service engineer on call permanently who wasn’t allowed to be further away than 25 miles from the servers at any time.
And retrocomputing geeks (and just any geek sufficiently old) got rueful grins on their faces.
This is traditional, in the sense of being old-fashioned. CPUs were built out of discrete components back when that meant individual vacuum tubes, discrete solid-state components, and then, finally, discrete chips. Thousands of individual SSI chips in computers like the Apollo Guidance Computer. Even after the first single-chip CPU was developed, larger computers still used multi-chip CPUs, like the PDP-11 architecture being implemented on four chips in the LSI-11 chipset.
https://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11_chip_set
That's before some people were born, I guess, so we have this.
Steve Jobs wanted NeXT to essentially be SGI.
I have a soft spot for the Octane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane
The G4 cube, was Apple version of it whe when Jobs returned to Apple.
How does the documentation for the software development environment for this machine stack up today?
I used a purple Indigo 2 as my desktop for a few years.
When there were some issues with the local hot and cold running power for a few weeks, sometimes I'd get home to my study after being out and about and see 'brownout detected' on my console xterm.
That was my cue to add "coax the x86 kit in the rack back to life" to my task list once I'd had a coffee and settled in.
(later it got rehomed to DrHyde's place in London where it served honourably as a CPAN testers machine until finally passing away of old age)
Yeah, I think the disks are the crux of the matter. Afaik, SCSI disks (those with a parallel interface) haven't been made in decades (those with FC interface are still made, I think). IDE drives, OTOH, can trivially be replaced (upgraded) with CF cards. Is there a SCSI to IDE (oh the horror) adapter?
And me disposing of an Sun Ultra 60 because it (was ancient and) came with the inferior IDE interface ...
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