The first time I saw an SGI machine was in 1987 at the SRI lab in Palo Alto, CA. it was running the jello-cube demo. I was blown away, I had access to an AED frame buffer that rendered images at about one scan-line per second, and this thing was running real-time physics simulations!
I had already decided I had to study computer graphics, but this was the turning point, I went to foothill college, where there was an IRIS-2000 Turbo, and learned IRIX. Later that lab got a 4D-20, and then a 4D-35. I then decided that I must work at SGI so I quit school and got a job as the first tech hire at the SGI help-desk, and then worked on the Desktop Computing group putting together IRIX configurations to mirror the disk image for new employee machines. I stayed at SGI for many years, I was a pre-sales presenter at the demo center for a while and got to use the cave installation a few times.
I moved to different positions at SGI but stayed there until 1998 when my group (by then I was a “World Builder’ at Cosmo) was sold to another company.
As part of my lay-off from Platinum a year later I got to keep my by-then depreciated assets. So somewhere in my garage is a Power Indigo2, and an R4000 (I think).
(01-09-2019, 10:25 PM)airbozo Wrote: 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.
I still have (and wear) my ‘attitude inside’ shirt. I was part of the team that was distributing them, and didn’t return mine when management got scared and decided not to let anyone wear them (they replaced them with ones with just the Onyx logo) I wore it proudly to Siggraph that year (although not while I was working the SGI booth). It’s pretty old now, but I still wear it to place I’m likely to bump into old-time 3D guys to see if anyone will recognize it.
RH
