[jan-jaap]

Some screen shots from "The making of" from the DVD of "Jurassic Park": http://sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/j...l#makingof

This shows a room full of what looks like twin tower PowerSeries, mostly. If the skins reflect what's inside, most would have VGX graphics (blue top) or GTX graphics (red). I spot at least one single tower PowerSeries GTX as well. It shows RGB (monitor) cables attached to some, and terminals attached to others. If you're going to use a room full of PowerSeries for rendering frames then you might as well pull the graphics out in order to reduce heat generation.

'420' probably refers to the CPU configuration: a 4D/420, a single IP15 CPU board with dual 40MHz R3000's, the fastest you could get before Crimson arrived. The PowerSeries chassis will take two IP15 boards though, which gives you a lot more CPU power per unit floor space. That would be a 4D/440. I happen to have one of those. It is not possible in any way to install an Indigo CPU board in a PowerSeries chassis. If you wanted a single CPU board it would be a PowerSeries IP9 board, but that would terrible in terms of space or power efficiency. The other way around (a PowerSeries CPU board in an Indigo) is laughable. I mean, just look.

It was possible to order the Crimson with the graphics of an Indigo: the Crimson Elan. The Crimson (IP17) firmware has support for this. The PowerSeries IP5/IP7/IP9/IP15 firmware does not. The old Alias software I've seen is also hard-coded to the graphics hardware, like VGX or GTX. I'm pretty sure the combination IP15-Elan is not in there either.

Everything before the Indy was commonly called an "IRIS". There was the "Professional IRIS", it's little brother "Personal IRIS", the PowerSeries has badges that said e.g. "IRIS 4D/420 VGX" etc. The Indigo was the "IRIS Indigo". It's been 30 years since Jurassic Park, I wouldn't be surprised if the '420 Indigo' really was an IRIS 4D/420. It would make a good system to review rendered frames: you don't need 4 or more CPUs for that. It would make sense for key people to have the fastest CPU (qualified for Alias software!) though, and in 1991/1992 that would have been the 40MHz R3000 IP15.

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This must be a similar type of machine (4D/420VGX), as it seems to be pretty rare: (I've only been able to find this example of this machine on the internet)

That looks like a 4D/420VGX, or a '320 maybe, but the skins are from a PowerSeries 210 GTX (red top).

I happen to have a real 4D/420VGX in a single tower chassis, though I installed a second CPU board so now it's technically a 4D/440VGX. Systems with VGX graphics have blue top hats:


This is what's inside. The IP15 boards are roughly in the middle, with the black handles. If this would have been a 'factory' 4D/440 it probably also would have had a flat cable from the second CPU board to the bulkheads to connect extra serial ports.


Otherwise, this system has (on the left) two VME option cards: an FDDI board and a SCSI card (narrow high voltage differential, never found anything that could attach to it). This one also has dual raster managers (right hand side, with the row of LEDs) which makes it a 10-span VGX.

Oh, fun fact: I have the original invoice for this system. I think it was well over 200.000DM, after discounts, with a single IP15 board, a single RM and 'only' 24MB RAM (still a lot in 1991, but now it has 256MB). I think the RAM alone cost 1000DM per MB.

I think this is one of my coolest SGI systems. I rebuilt the PSU a couple of years ago, but otherwise it never gave me any problems and it still works fine, despite being > 30 years old.