SGI Indigo

But they were really, really good. An Indigo² Solid Impact R4400SC 250 was my main PC from 1998 until I left the US in late 2003. Built like a tank. Incredibly smooth in operation. Rang rings around my iMac G4, which ended up just sitting on top of the SGI's Trinitron running iTunes. I loved that machine, and I will go retrieve it in a few months. Now the Fuel, of the final MIPS generation, was hot garbage. Early-2000s PC crap plus SGI does not equal awesome. Fast, but flaky, stuttery, and with too many graphical artifacts for the price. Maybe the V12 was better than the V10. I don't care to find out.

My first decent *NIX computer was an SGI Indigo that I rescued from a dumpster at a military-adjacent subcontractor that was also my first tech job. Hmmm. Probably it wasn't sterilized by the book. I took that beast home and loved it. It was actually reasonably beefy even into 2001, and IRIX was very slick *NIX by 2000 standards. When you turned it on you could see my electric meter spin faster. Came with a huge-for-the-time monitor, probably a 19", which caused some envy among friends.*

Back then, when SGI quit the graphics business and went to supercomputers only (having NUMA as IP, and going with Linux) the GPU devs each ended up at Nvidia. Apple had to pick Be, Inc. or NeXT (who had Jobs). They went with the latter. Be, later on, went to Palm, but that was too little, too late. SGI was one of the many Unix mastodons who fell victim of PC hardware (x86-32, then x86-64) and Windows NT, Linux being good enough, with Apple taking the piece for graphics designers and audio engineering (many whom came from Amiga, and SGI). Oh, and I forgot to mention: they bet on the Intel Itanic. I wouldn't pay a dime for these nowadays. Way too slow / inefficient W/performance. Which is really sad, but with current energy prices I just wouldn't be able to afford my Octane 2 using 1 kW anymore. I owned many SGI machines, really loved them (the sound card in the Indy was insanely good! And IndyCam from a time when hardly anyone had a webcam). Indy (various, including Challenger S), Indigo (including purple remake), Indigo 2, and Octane 2. But never an O2 :) nor a Fuel or Tezro ;) cases, although plastic and sensitive to scratches, were great aesthetical, too. While I would not want such machine anymore, I will cherish the memories though! Plus, there are some people reusing the cases. Cool beans! IMNSHO, SGI machines like Indy belong in any half decent Unix museum.

We had a few ex-mining company workstations at the computer club at university – I remember that the metal security bar through the Indigo workstation could be pulled out and waved at one's fellow users, usually in good fun. :) They were fun machines to play around on; even when we first got them c ~ 1999 PCs with a graphics card were catching up, but there was just something solid about them. I miss those days of *NIX workstations.

Fun fact, I worked on a transputer board for both Amiga and PC way back when. It was doing real time video processing for both machine vision and also broadcast solutions. For the PC version I wrote the SCSI "drivers" that made the storage talk to transputer card, and also the API that let the transputer board do the video capture and processing for both machine vision and a broadcast capable non-linear video editing system. Just the lower level API, not the NLVE system itself. That was a different team. For the Amiga I did the video capture API, that grabbed frames and fed them to the storage system. Which also let me complete my Bachelor's thesis/final year project. The Amiga design was a lot easier to work with than the PC. I recall the reason for this was that PC was trying to satisfy multiple operating systems; DOS, OS/2 Warp, Windows 3.1, some old version of UNIX, but the Amiga card just supported, IIRC, the AmigaOS. I forget the name of the company now, "Video something-something?", or "Vision something-something?" they had an office (one of several) in Bristol, UK, though I think the company was London based. I think they may have been a subsidiary of a much larger entity. This was around 1991/1992, so well in to the Amiga lifespan by then. I had an A2000 with a quad-transputer card (though usually it only had two transputers in it because they were in short supply) on my desk. In the design, the Transputer sat in front of a chunk of spinning rust storage, and your PC…

I spent many years working on high-end TV weather graphics on SGI Indigo, Onyx, and the O2 (toaster over shaped) boxes; they were remarkable for their time and the hours and hours it took to render graphics made for really nice downtime at work letting me say things like "sorry, can't do anything, graphics are rendering". The best source for hardware ended up being a local university surplus shop where we could get the big SGI monitors for pennies on the dollar.

Looks beautiful! The SGI Indigo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indigo ) was quite the advanced piece of hardware back in the day (1991), where it could be thought of as the graphics "spiritual successor" to the color NeXTstation (1990) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation , which could in turn be thought about as the graphics "spiritual successor" to the original Amiga 1000 in 1985 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000 ). (Of course, later in computer history, discrete graphics cards (the ancestor of the AI accelerator card) would grow in scope and power, eventually surpassing graphics capabilities that were specifically tied to, or bound to, a specific manufacturer or computer type -- but the SGI Indigo was a revolutionary milestone for its place and time in this history! They are still collectible today, and I highly applaud the author(s) of this project for bringing back (on FPGA with Verilog!) this quintessential piece of computer / computer graphics history!) Anyway, looks beautiful!