[epitaxial]

My dad worked for Westinghouse and back in the early 1990s they had an open house day on a Saturday for family to come in and look around. I don't recall what model SGI it was but it had the dialbox attached. That probably spurred my love of workstations and big iron. It was amazing to see the server rooms with the raised floors and desks full of Sun and Apollo boxes. They even had a Cray-2 I got to see and have a seat on. The "control room" for that just had rows of terminals and monitors all over.

I asked him whatever happened with the Cray hardware and he said it was offered to Ukraine or the Czech Republic who declined it for a bunch of desktops. He said in the end it was scrapped :(

Found a pic http://archive.computerhistory.org/resou...523.lg.jpg

[BackPlaner]

My dad worked for Westinghouse and back in the early 1990s they had an open house day on a Saturday for family to come in and look around. I don't recall what model SGI it was but it had the dialbox attached. That probably spurred my love of workstations and big iron. It was amazing to see the server rooms with the raised floors and desks full of Sun and Apollo boxes. They even had a Cray-2 I got to see and have a seat on. The "control room" for that just had rows of terminals and monitors all over.

I asked him whatever happened with the Cray hardware and he said it was offered to Ukraine or the Czech Republic who declined it for a bunch of desktops. He said in the end it was scrapped :(

Found a pic http://archive.computerhistory.org/resou...523.lg.jpg

Very cool, thanks for sharing such a great memory! Love the pictures too.👍

[sancho]

Mid 90's, I was in my early 20's, was a SIGGRAPH addict and following eagerly anything about SGI/3D stuff.
I knew my way in 3DS max at the time but as a student, the company I was working part time had a loan SGI Indigo for a few days... Maya, Softimage, all the 3D stuff the big boys had, I was in heaven...
I never did that many extra hours in my life than during these few days  

Now I own an Octane...

[matyas]

My dad worked for Westinghouse and back in the early 1990s they had an open house day on a Saturday for family to come in and look around. I don't recall what model SGI it was but it had the dialbox attached. That probably spurred my love of workstations and big iron. It was amazing to see the server rooms with the raised floors and desks full of Sun and Apollo boxes. They even had a Cray-2 I got to see and have a seat on. The "control room" for that just had rows of terminals and monitors all over.

I asked him whatever happened with the Cray hardware and he said it was offered to Ukraine or the Czech Republic who declined it for a bunch of desktops. He said in the end it was scrapped :(

Found a pic http://archive.computerhistory.org/resou...523.lg.jpg

[Tesseract]

My first sight of an SGI was back around 1996 or 1997 at a regional computer trade show (remember those? ). From what I remember, it was an Indigo2 Impact with a huge 21 inch Granite display running a demo of CA's Unicenter TNG. The person at the controls (I also remember him using a huge spaceball) was showing me the world view of the software's network management interface where they had established mock data centers in large cities around the globe. He would hone in from one city's data center to another and I was awestruck by the graphics it produced. He also showed me a little of the Irix desktop manager as it was so foreign to me. What a beautiful machine, I thought. I later saw a few more teal and purple Indigo2s out on display in one of the adjacent halls, all propped up on their feet stands looking elegant and proud. To this day, the Indigo2 Impact is my favorite.

I never forgot those machines and unfortunately the SGIs never came back in subsequent trade shows that I was aware of as I attended them regularly at that time. That was the first and last time I seen them on display at these trade shows until I bought my first Indigo2 R4000 a few years ago.

[airbozo]

My first SGI encounter was back in 1988 at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach.  I was working on flight simulators and aircraft testing and SGI came in to install several Iris' to run the visuals on our new simulator and for development.  They came in, setup the workstations, validated them and turned them over to our department in less than 3 days. They worked perfectly and it was the first time I had ever seen a company install computers with no issues. I vowed to work for them one day.

I got that chance in the late '90's when I convinced my boss at Mindsource to find me a contract inside SGI (I was working as a contractor at SUN). Despite his best advice and pleading with me not to go to SGI due to their financial woes, he got me a contract in the engineering department doing desktop support and backups. Six months later they bought out my contract and made me full time. I had a blast and when SGI was moving into their new digs (currently the Googleplex in Mountain View), I was offered a position running the Engineering Reality Center in the Advanced Graphics Division.

My Lab (Not me in the picture):


I moved that lab from B6 to What was supposed to be a theater, but my group took it over and the adjoining rooms for our testing center and Virtual Reality labs. I spent a couple more years there and got rif'd when they started downsizing, but got hired back by my original manager as a support engineer in the engineering department again. I was the first person in my department to get an O2 on my desktop and it was an R10K. The stipulation was that I had to do testing on it a couple hours a day.  Part of it was to play games that exercised the graphics, audio and network. I still have that O2, but it now has clear skins.

I was involved in the build of Future Flight Central at NASA AMES research center (https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/r...ratio.html) using Onyx2000 systems and later supported it when working for a company that refurbished SUN and SGI systems, before they replaced the SGI systems with PC based image generators.

I was also involved in several other large scale visual labs and still think of it as the best job I have ever had. From time to time I still help certain companies fix and find parts for their systems. I still attend the yearly reunions (when they happen) and keep in touch with many friends, some who still work for what the company has become (HPE). I also keep in contact with the Father of the O2, Dave Parry. He has some great stories of how the O2 and Octane got to market.


It's really amazing to see all of the companies that have spawned from official and unofficial R&D at SGI.

Google earth/maps came from a program called Space to Your Face that was made to showcase specific graphics technology and started out in space looking at the earth.  The tour then took you to the Matterhorn where the program dove down into the mountain and eventually showing the NES then to the graphics chip on the board. My department spent millions hiring airplanes to fly over certain areas of the bay area collecting images and processing them, which then got turned over to an outside company when SGI started faltering.

Netflix came from work being done in the media labs (with help from developers working with porn companies to manage and move "adult" images and video. Indy's then O2's became the computer of choice for the "adult" live cam girls.  The O200 was the server of choice for these companies, prompting the rare and probably extinct shirt that read:  SGI We are the : in http, a parody of SUN's "We are the . in .com". A lot of people got in trouble for those shirts and most were collected and destroyed. I know there must still be some out there. SGI would not sell directly to the porn companies, so a dummy corp was setup to be a distributor. Many years later I met a guy that made his first, second and third million dolars selling O2's to porn companies. Man he had some good stories.

Same with companies like photobucket. The technology to store and access images came from the same media labs.

I'll add to the lore as I remember some of the stories and ask others I still know to chime in.  Hate to lose any of the history.

I used to have a collection of demos and 3d models including the new Bay Bridge, the ISS and a couple different Oil Rigs. I also had the code from the Jet Fighter Cafe that used to be near SGI.  I have to check to see if I still have those drives.  I seem to remeber giving them to someone who worked at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (another old SGI building).

I have some documentation that might be interesting to some folks and when I get a chance I will contact the authors and see if I can publish them. One is all about troubleshooting the graphics subsystems of the original Onyx up to the Origin3000.

Glad I found this place and even happier these systems still draw interest. I will pop in from time to time to see if I can help people keep their systems alive (something I am really good at).

[Intuition]

Fantastic dissertation and story arc AirBozo. I always derive such fun from any information and stories from this early era of computer visualization and anything related to Silicon Graphics.  Thank you for sharing. 

[airbozo]

No Problem.

I have a ton of stories from SGI. Even more t-shirts.

Another T-shirt story comes from a trade show we were at where Intel was proudly touting their "Intel Inside" Campaign. It was just about the time SGI was starting to collaborate with Intel and we went out and hod some t-shirts printed that mimicked the Intel theme except with the SGI logo and the tag line: "Attitude Inside".

Most of those shirts got destroyed as well. I never got one, but if I did, it would still be on my shelf.

[jan-jaap]

Nice story!

I have some documentation that might be interesting to some folks and when I get a chance I will contact the authors and see if I can publish them. One is all about troubleshooting the graphics subsystems of the original Onyx up to the Origin3000.

Internal Support Tools, by any chance? I've got one of those with some other material coming from the Cortaillod (Switzerland) facility that I still need to process. They seem to be awfully IRIX specific so more  == better. For the older IRIX versions they were called 'Diagnostics X.Y', same deal.

The troubleshooting doc about the Onyx (the original one at least) has been on Ian Mapleson's site since well before SGI first went bankrupt so I assume nobody will object to publishing such material. Really anything helps when dealing with these old monsters and is hugely appreciated.

[spiroyster]

Google earth/maps came from a program called Space to Your Face that was made to showcase specific graphics technology and started out in space looking at the earth.  The tour then took you to the Matterhorn where the program dove down into the mountain and eventually showing the NES then to the graphics chip on the board. My department spent millions hiring airplanes to fly over certain areas of the bay area collecting images and processing them, which then got turned over to an outside company when SGI started faltering.

How did Keyhole fit in to this? I used to be on bbs.keyhole back before Google got hold of it and turned it into Google Earth. I always thought keyhole developed the tech for it?

Sound likes you do have some really interesting stories to tell