[Intuition]

Same story I told at Nekochan.

I moved to Los Angeles to do computer animation/3d VFX etc. The o2 and Octane hadn't come out yet. I was using a program called Crystal Topas 3D.
It was decent for the early jobs when just having some text with a soft drop shadow was enough. Having anything 3D animation in 1995 was still considered pretty high end.

In 1996 I went to Siggraph in Los Angeles at the Staples Center. Siggraph was really something to behold back then. The big Softimage booths, Renderman/Pixar Booth, Alias/WAvefront Booth, and Silicon Graphics booths. I remember seeing the o2 and Octane and had just saved what I thought was a fat $12,000 from a few recent 3d jobs.

I met with the Silicon Graphics guys, played with Softimage, and they told me to meet them at their Olympic/Bundy office in Santa Monica.
Went there a week or so later. Can't remember which floor. They had a full on interactive experience where you check which software and which computer with which ram/cpus/hard drives etc.

They brought out donuts, coffee, etc.

When I was finished I was quoted like $22,000ish for Softimage and around $44,000ish for the computer.
I was hopelessly depressed. My measely $12,000 was able to get a decent early model o2 but then no Softimage. :(

I ended up buying into Lightwave 3D for like $1000-ish and got a top notch Intel computer.
Later that year the guys across the hall got an Octane and I was able to use it to mess with Softimage here and there.

Never really was able to use an SGI for a paying gig. My first Maya and Softimage gigs were on a PC later as well.
The o2 I bought in 2009 was a kind of retro gift to my younger self. The Octane I acquired last year from Fox was really the Octane I wanted back then.
It is snappy and runs really nice and is the proper SGI experience I was hoping for back in 1996.

It is pure pleasure making tutorials on them and using the IRIX OS. Getting to try Houdini on Irix was a big surprise as well as Alias in this last year.
Maya and Softimage were far more capable than I thought they would be after having run them through the paces trying to make them behave like modern software.

They still do very well considering it was on hardware/software that is 20ish years ago now.