I used an Indigo2 with a pair of 21" Sony 13w3 monitors (one rebadged as Sun, one as CGI) as my desktop for a couple years.
When I finally had reason to swap it out for a more normal system, it went down to London to become a CPAN testers smoke testing machine until the hardware finally gave out.
Fantastic piece of kit. I especially liked that when we had a few weeks of power blips if I came home to see 'power brownout detected' as a console log entry (it always survived them fine itself) that was a useful indicator to go through all my x86 kit and bring the casualties back up.
That was in ... '04 ish? And, yes, it was indeed awesome.
As with all my desktops since time immemorial, its purpose was to provide an X11 environment that I used to ssh to everything else, so I never really stressed the machine itself.
This isn't (I think, memory fuzzy at this remove) a screenshot from that box, but it'll give you a feel for what one of my monitors would be displaying - https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg
Zero use of any of the shiny, just treating it as a solid old school workstation - the closest I had to a complaint was that it took me a little while to adjust to the level of fan noise.
With a remote browser instance to deal with the billion tons of JS I wouldn't at all mind going back to that setup today.
But it served valiantly in its subsequent life, so I feel I treated it with the respect it deserved.
(also because nobody really cared about that sort of kit at the time the Indigo2 and the monitors were cheap pickups off ebay, I'm not sure I've ever had better "bang for the buck" from building out a work setup)
These things were so awesome back in the 90s. I got to use quite a few of them and even owned a couple in the early 2000s as they were being thrown away.
It always blew my mind that systems like SGI and SUN existed and yet somehow windows was allegedly cutting edge.
I once had a magical collection of chips from old Unix workstations - dec alphas and vax, dig and sun. I was responsible for cleaning out a large storage room of computers from the 70s-90s and I pulled all the processors I could because they were amazing objects to look at.
I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.
I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time in the end.
It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI’s around the edges.
But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux. There was just no competition and as much as I loved the legacy Unix stuff it wasn’t as nice or as easy to run as open source alternatives.
I’m not sure it was a much considered cutting edge rather it was considered cost effective. 99.99% of office workers did not need this kind of workstation, windows systems were cheaper and became ubiquitous.
I mainly meant “to the general public” this (windows 98) was cutting edge.
Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.
It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.
I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3 windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac just worked.
The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them anytime one broke I’d just boot a Linux CD and use “nc” and “dd” to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user just thought I’d fixed their computer.
Windows NT - the OS to run on comparable computers - was cutting edge, and still is in many ways. Don't be fooled by the similarly named products made for 100x less powerful computers.
NT and intel didn't catch up SGI/Mips and Dec/Alpha until the Pentium III, and in the case of the Alpha, even the 800MHZ one was subpar against the Alpha.
Ditto with the N64. I think there's a WIP backport of Super Mario 64 for Irix 6 by reusing the decomp and the PC source port. The PC one can run under GL 1.3 and GLIDE, nothing fancy.
As a longhaired teenager, I rarely got the chance to physically touch these things (although it did happen a couple times). Mostly I remember telnetting into a machine, noticing that it was Irix, and being able to login as "4Dgifts" without a password for a root shell. The joy was short-lived though, because as soon as you tried to build software (regardless of how "portable" the package was), you ran into interesting problems, if the compilers were even installed. I eventually got to spend several days with a Webforce Indy and its fancy (what we would now call a) webcam, where I took my first-ever selfie in 1995 and made my peace with the dev environment. These lil things were definitely ahead of their time, even if their price tags weren't.
The 90s SGI machines were great, for graphics, but it is mystifying how many people used them as standard workstations given things like Suns had better CPUs. Toy Story was designed on SGIs and rendered on Suns for a reason after all.
The great oddity of SGIs was the multimedia peripherals worked properly, and this is the bit of the experience the NT and Linux replacements never quite managed.
I bought one when I started an ISP, could have used intel with Linux but Linux was very very new. After the ISP was acquired (just the customers, not the hardware) I had the Indy in my apartment for a bit, but someone really wanted it and I was able to sell it for decent change.
Did anyone else notice that they made strange clicking sounds?
I always assumed the click was the drive but never knew. The rhythm reminded me of the old 70's Battlestar Galactica Cylon eyes. It was a weird, slow click.
Surprisingly entertaining video. It was on a workstation similar to this one that I first used the Mosaic web browser circa 1993. Strangely, the first web site I visited featured a picture of Al Gore (not making this up) then US VP. I cannot find a reference to that web site anywhere or what content it may have contained. Does anyone else remember this?
Reportedly, whitehouse.gov was implemented in Common Lisp. (This was before the dotcom gold rush, so a lot of Web stuff was done by fringe Internet/computer uber-nerds -- mostly "this is interesting", and not usually "this pays money".)
In probably 1999, I had a borrowed old Indigo 2 (probably with IMPACT graphics) in my dorm room... used only as a generic general-purpose Unix workstation, not for 3D.
I replaced it with a modest Linux box, which was much more practical (Celeron 500MHz, 128MB RAM, basic Matrox G200 graphics, non-fruit-colored case): https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/
Readit News
When I finally had reason to swap it out for a more normal system, it went down to London to become a CPAN testers smoke testing machine until the hardware finally gave out.
Fantastic piece of kit. I especially liked that when we had a few weeks of power blips if I came home to see 'power brownout detected' as a console log entry (it always survived them fine itself) that was a useful indicator to go through all my x86 kit and bring the casualties back up.
As with all my desktops since time immemorial, its purpose was to provide an X11 environment that I used to ssh to everything else, so I never really stressed the machine itself.
This isn't (I think, memory fuzzy at this remove) a screenshot from that box, but it'll give you a feel for what one of my monitors would be displaying - https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg
Zero use of any of the shiny, just treating it as a solid old school workstation - the closest I had to a complaint was that it took me a little while to adjust to the level of fan noise.
With a remote browser instance to deal with the billion tons of JS I wouldn't at all mind going back to that setup today.
But it served valiantly in its subsequent life, so I feel I treated it with the respect it deserved.
(also because nobody really cared about that sort of kit at the time the Indigo2 and the monitors were cheap pickups off ebay, I'm not sure I've ever had better "bang for the buck" from building out a work setup)
It always blew my mind that systems like SGI and SUN existed and yet somehow windows was allegedly cutting edge.
As a geek, I miss exotic Unix hardware with their shapes, colors, and RISC chips. As a nerd, who needs that when AMD64 and Nvdia get the job done.
I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.
I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time in the end.
It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI’s around the edges.
But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux. There was just no competition and as much as I loved the legacy Unix stuff it wasn’t as nice or as easy to run as open source alternatives.
I’m glad I got to play in that world though.
Dead Comment
I mainly meant “to the general public” this (windows 98) was cutting edge.
Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.
It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.
I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3 windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac just worked.
The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them anytime one broke I’d just boot a Linux CD and use “nc” and “dd” to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user just thought I’d fixed their computer.
It was a fun time.
The great oddity of SGIs was the multimedia peripherals worked properly, and this is the bit of the experience the NT and Linux replacements never quite managed.
Did anyone else notice that they made strange clicking sounds?
This archive is from later (IIRC, HTML table layout wasn't yet used in 1993): https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/
Reportedly, whitehouse.gov was implemented in Common Lisp. (This was before the dotcom gold rush, so a lot of Web stuff was done by fringe Internet/computer uber-nerds -- mostly "this is interesting", and not usually "this pays money".)
Not all. The publications distribution feature was implement in Common Lisp.
> so a lot of Web stuff was done by fringe Internet/computer uber-nerds
That part was actually done by a team from MIT.
I replaced it with a modest Linux box, which was much more practical (Celeron 500MHz, 128MB RAM, basic Matrox G200 graphics, non-fruit-colored case): https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/