[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).