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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.""
One particular quote I found interesting is, ""In the SGI hobbyist world it's not six degrees of separation, it's three, often less. I recently met one of the industrial light and magic guys who worked on Star Wars: Episode II." I find that this happens all the time in the slightly larger Mac crowd. Easy to pick out the users and get an in-depth conversation started. Once you start you find any and all sorts of wierd and useful connections. Heck, thats mainly how I have the current job I have. Also while travelling overseas the other week I ran into a corporate Apple guy that used to work with my boss. Small world definitely, and being an active part of a small, but active community makes it even more personal.
Glad that there are opportunities for people to keep SGI going. I know I sure have looked at all of those eBay auctions at one time just to see what it was all about. At the current going price on some of the older hardware, I don't see what you have to lose.
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.
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I learned the power of u??x on an SGI workstation about ten years ago. Being stuck on a 386sx system running dos at home I longed for an Irix machine of my own.
I saw this article last week and enjoyed reading it, but at the end I was still left wondering "WHY?" I love old radios and stereo gear so I'm not unappreciative of the nostalgia aspect, but my linux desktop now is, in most ways, just as fulfilling as the old irix system I grew to love.
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop. In the end I'd rather have something gorgeously deco that I could keep around for years and upgrade as needed.
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
I have an Indy that I picked up free, and the real problem is support.
I'd like to get a more up-to-date version of Irix on it, but going from the 6.5.0 disks that I have to the most current releases is a pain. A big pain. A pain that makes the most b0rk3d RPM install look like a hot bath with a supermodel.
I don't want a full support contract from SGI - for a 150MHz machine that would be a total waste of time and money.
What I'd *love* would be a way to get a set of current disks for, say US$30, with the disclaimer "You are on your own. Don't call us, we won't call you."
I've been looking at putting Linux on it, just to have a bit more "support" on the machine. Now that the video subsystem is a bit better supported I may just do that.
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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?
I used an SGI Iris 24 bit color workstation with a 21" monitor back in 1990. I still get misty thinking about it. We used them for computational chemistry and visualization. Shading, transparency, GL had it all even back then. Coming as I did from a Vax 750 background, this was pretty amazing. The workstation came with a flight simulator to show off GL graphic power. These were beautiful machines, solid, well engineered. The aethetics have not been surpassed to this day. Sadly, some business guy tried to turn SGI into a PC company, and they alienated their devoted scientific and engineering users. Same thing happened to Sun except they sold out to corporate IT and big iron.
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#1. Their machines are still propietary. they are using their using Altix system but require an ATI FireGL card. ummm.. no thanks. which brings us to #2. #2. we are now using exclusively windows and linux. my machine(our machines) run faster, smoother and have the latest openGL libraries, functionality. when we want to get a new GPU we get one, take out the old card and plug the new one in. #3. $$$$.. and lots of it. lets say you want to get a cluster with 5 CPU's, along with a host node. each node has a Geforce 6800, 4GB of RAM, 3.6 Ghz CPU's, you buy the software for it, and all the outs and ins of the system. on average this system will cost you $80,000. to buy one SGI box that is inferior to this cluster, even a small SGI supercomputer would not outperform it plus just the MAINTENANCE on this SGI will cost you $80,000 or more per year. this is what it would cost to REPLACE your old cluster after just one year with the latest graphics cards, latest processors and you still have maintenance that costs nothing compared to that. i think we can all agree what the obvious choice of computing power is.
"This is a Unix system. I know this." - Lex.
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SGI faced the innovator's dilemma big-time; it was tricky to cannabalize their $2 billion workstation business for a $300 million graphics card market. And to move from being a full-system vendor to being a graphics card vendor. And even with all the management and business-issue problems, I noticed three problems their engineering effortsg never overcame:
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
Inside was a collection of workstations all running very impressive (at the time) GL demos with realtime "twist this knob and rotate the champagne glass" kind of stuff.
We have at least three Origin 2000 systems, one is 96 node...so you know the demos must have helped at least some :)
If it wasn't for our Origins running Matlab I probably would not have tried linux until much later. The only reason I tried linux was to use X and run Matlab remotely.
My understanding is that SGI had some hairy X11 extensions -- obviously tailored for their hardware -- which made for video performance that nobody could touch.
This is the trouble with "generic" computers/OSs such as Mac and the PC -- they're aiming at doing everything, and accordingly, they cannot excel at any one thing like a specifically designed machine/OS can.
That said, Macs still spank PCs at video and typography, and PCs still spank Macs at games and.. I guess.. office. There's some specialization in the Mac and PC world, just not as balls-to-the-wall as SGI.
On a side note, I used to do texture mapping for the early incarnation of the Alice project ( www.alice3d.org, but back in '96 when it was still at UVa ). We used an SGI Reality Engine, and it made my hairs stand up it was so powerful. I remember once I crashed it -- by accidently pressing the middle button on the haxored broken mouse which was taped and labeled "Don't press me" -- and we had to go to the server room to reboot it. This was my first exposure to a *real* computer, and seeing that it was rebooted by turning a key blew my mind.
I have to say, though, that crashing a server by clicking the (admittedly broken) middle mouse button on a terminal is pretty appalling. Something was clearly Very Wrong in the setup.
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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
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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)
Back before they shrunk their name, Silicon Graphics Inc. had some fun stuff to play with but even in the glory days I wouldn't believe how overpriced it was.
I've used the green boxed machines (their name escapes me), the Iris, the Indy, the O2, and a whole bunch of "oven" machines. All of them very nice to play with but all of which were very expensive. These where the guys who came up with IrisGL which was the forerunner to OpenGL. They went "64-bit" early too although they did it the wrong way (changing the OS moniker to "IRIX64" broke many Makefiles). All was right and good...as long as there was no one else in the same product space.
It was around the mid 90s when several new things started to pop up. Sun and HP noticed how SGI was a "darling" and wanted in on the action and tried to create their own "graphics workstation" both of which weren't as nice and often times a lot cheaper. Around this time, as well know, a little OS known as Linux started to get some steam and a little project known as Mesa started to actually conform to OpenGL.
So now they had pressure from the top and the bottom. I also viewed their buying Cray as a bad move because it didn't make their technology any cheaper to compete against Sun and HP let alone the cheap Windows or Linux workstation with a semi-decent AGP card.
The last SGI machine I saw ran Windows 2K. Such a shame because it was still way overpriced from what you could buy "off the shelf". Maybe things would have been different if they embraced Open Source to cut down the overhead. I honestly don't know. Retreating into the supercomputer product space made me notice how much they were the Amiga/Commedore of the 90s. They were too pretty, too expensive, too early.
I was an SGI employee during the "glory days', and got to watch the company go downhill until I got laid off in the umpteenth wave of "rightsizing". But in spite of the layoff, I love SGI. The only problem with SGI was that they were just too d@mn good at everything. They treated their employees like kings. Their pay was 10-20% above their competitors. They had free sodas and gourmet coffee for employees *before* the dot.com boom. Their machines were always the best-of-the-best. Most powerful CPUs, best graphics, most user friendly OS. Their suppot staff were highly trained degreed EEs who actually knew how the comuters worked down to the circuit level, not fresh-out-of-highschool dweebs with a 3-month certificate in micros@ftology. What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes." Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
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Then Microsoft bought Softimage, and made them come out with an NT version. The first serious OpenGL graphics cards (DirectX was stil in the future) came from vendors like Fujitsu and Dynamic Pictures. They didn't work very well. Installation required direct cooperation with the board developers. But they did have the 4x4 matrix multiplier for geometric transforms and a hardware Z buffer, just like an SGI machine.
That's when the studios started gettting NT-based animation systems. They weren't standard desktop PCs at first, though. Intergraph sold "high end NT workstations", and it was worth it simply because they could make the graphics board play nice with the motherboard. Softimage on NT on the DEC Alpha had a following.
One real issue for a few years was that it was seen as "unprofessional" to be using a PC for animation. At one point I had a Pentium Pro in a black rackmount case, and industry people asked me where they could get one like that, so their shop would look "professional".
Then came mainstream motherboards with AGP slots, and finally, the graphics board had enough memory bandwidth to work right. Then serious graphics boards went mainstream, and it was all downhill for Silicon Graphics after that.