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Reliving The Glory Days of SGI
devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""
The best thing about SG workstations was(is) that they came in funky blue or green boxes rather than beige. And this was years before Apple caught onto the idea and applied it to the iMac.
Oh, they were pretty good at their job, but perhaps that's just a coincidence.
I was at a confernce in orlando last week, and there was a parallel conference which seemed to be mostly military simulation stuff, they seemed to be pretty strong there. Guess they moved to the more lucrative stuff.
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
"This is a Unix system. I know this." - Lex.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeImages/F ilm/JPark/
Here a Sig There a Sig Everywhere a Sig Sig...
> Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself,
;)
Most likely user error.
> and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS
SGI's have a PROM, it's pretty slick.
> password to allow reinstallation
Most SGIs have a jumper to reset the PROM password. It's a FAQ that should take 10 seconds to figure out. It's also in the user manual which if you don't have you can download off of techpubs.sgi.com. You could also have posted on any of the comp.sys.sgi groups and after people flame you for asking a FAQ someone would tell you what to do.
> from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM
> drive we'd spent weeks hunting down.
I've never had a SCSI CD-ROM that wouldn't boot IRIX. Any Toshiba drive will work.
> There turned out to be no way of resetting
> that password, at least not without wiping
> the MAC address too. Given that the machine
> was only useful as an X terminal and web
> browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Sad indeed because all you needed to do was set a jumper.
This is one of the reasons I don't listen to most people's opinions unless it's pretty clear they're experts. It makes more sense to figure it our yourself. Too many times I hear people have immense difficulty or distaste for something and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing. Kinda like the people in infomercials who can't chop an onion or coil up a garden hose or rake leaves.
Or maybe it's more like a Ferrari. Lottery winners will abuse their high performance cars and then complain when something goes wrong ("stupid imported piece of junk!"). In fact this is so common many long-time Ferrari owner's have a name for these type of people: gold-chainers.
To be sure SGI systems have their quirks but most of the negative things you hear about them are not true. I'd encourage people to pick one up and see for themselves but then I don't want to drive up prices
He did the same thing at HP and/or DEC, and later went on to a nice high executive position at Microsoft. Coincidence? I think not!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
That was probably the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference.
I wouldn't look to military simultion for an example of a growth area. Some of the simulators are as old as the planes themselves, 30 years and older, with upgrades every three to five years to keep them up to date. FORTRAN is still the universal language, or at least the F77 dialect. C is starting to take over, but slowly, and Ada still has a sizable presence. In general, technologies and practices lag five to ten years behind the rest of the commerical world.
On the other hand, it is fairly secure work if you can get it. Lots of people can start in simulation and retire in it, which isn't true of a lot of industries. If you can get a security clearance, you are in even better shape.
So, don't worry about international outsourcing - just become a military contractor!
Heck, I use a Powerbook G4 for most of my tasks these days and my SGI O2 and SGI 320 NT box in my office are used little these days, but the Macs do lack some advanced hardware features that are only available on Infinite Reality gfx boards and Tezro v12. See Discreet's website and you'll notice that Flame, Inferno and Fire still run on ONLY SGI hardware. SGI InfiniteReality boards are used as image generators for flight military flight simulators and also to drive the Inferno compositing and film mastering, using up to 32 film resolution layers and 10-bit anti-aliased graphics
Sure, Nvidia and ATI cards go have an polygon count advantage and they do have features like pixel and vertex shaders, but overall for high fidelity graphics one still goes back to SGIs. If one looks at what is capable in Final Cut Pro HD, it still falls in terms of output quality compared to what an SGI can handle. For video DMediaPro options with support for two streams of high-definition 10-bit 4:4:4:4 RGBA video. Or if one needed to generate your own video signal. Programmable FPGA video card or drive a C.A.V.E. or Powerwall SGI Mutichannel Option cards are capable of doing this. I have yet to see PC based Image Generator be as successful at doing this without a lot of hacking, blood, sweat and tears. SGI's handle the tough visualization tasks do out of the box. SGI's gfx API are second to none
OpenGL Inventor
OpenGL Multipipe (+ SDK)
OpenGL Optimizer
OpenGL Performer
OpenGL Shader
OpenGL Vizserver
OpenGL Volumizer
ImageVision and Image Format Library (IFL)
SGI was a great company, although it was badly mismanaged. I'd love to see it merged with Apple and all the SGI gfx API's integrated into OS X. Plus other tecnologies like ccNUMA, XFS, CXFS, NUMAlink4 (6.4GBs), NUMAflex combined with Hypertransport and Infiniband (when customers need cheaper solution than NUMAlink)
Indeed the Indigo is much trickier to reset the PROM password. What you have to do then is remove the graphics and CPU board to get to the backplane and you can ground one pin on the EEPROM. As you can imagine it requires alot of care.
I had an Indigo2 get remote-rooted once. Oops. Then we had an Indy in the ACM office for a while. The President and I decided on a root password that, within 2 days, neither of us could remember. It took me nearly 50 seconds to root it without a compiler or network connection, and 30 seconds of that was spent waiting for the guy at the winterm next to me to let me Google for hints.
Keep it behind a firewall and you'll be fine. The Indy is a nice little box and lots of fun. I suggest keeping Irix on it, as half of the SGI experience is running Irix. I don't get people who buy every esoteric piece of hardware they can find and run the same OS on it as they do on their PC.