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Reliving The Glory Days of SGI

Posted by Hemos on from the could-they-return dept.

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.""

4 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Great styling. by deletedaccount · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Interesting by shlomo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Jurassic Park by myusername · · Score: 5, Informative
    Don't forget SGI's big moment in Jurassic Park!

    "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...
  4. Re:I miss SGI by RageEX · · Score: 5, Informative

    > 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 ;)