[jupo]

When I was a kid, my mom had a programming job at one of the major oil companies working with the geophysicists who were developing tools for the exploration division to figure out where to drill. I remember getting to visit in the early '90s and seeing row after row of cubicles with teal Indigo2's and granite Trinitrons and thinking, is this what all workplaces are like? I occasionally got to sit at one, logged into the demo account, and play with the flight simulator or just goof off with the 3d demos. I probably spent an hour just watching different screensavers. There was one weekend that I got to play on a demonstration Onyx2 that was on loan from SGI for the team to evaluate - she just dropped me off in the server room with it while she worked in her office down the hall for hours.

Starting in 1995, I got a chance to use one for real, though not quite as fancy. My mom was unexpectedly expecting and asked the company to let her work part-time from home. They set her up with a 33.6k modem and an R3k Indigo that had long since been retired from service but would still let her use Netscape for email, work on programming projects, kick off compile jobs on the servers, and sorta kinda remotely run X programs when absolutely necessary. As with all the workstations at the office, the Indigo was left on 24/7, and I was allowed to create my own account and even proxy through the corporate firewall using Lynx. After she wasn't using it much anymore, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, so I learned system administration and network configuration to dial up to our personal ISP and discovered the world of open source software. I spent so many summer days and school nights compiling gcc and Apache and ImageMagick and GIMP and MUDs and MUSHes... and then hosting ad-hoc servers off our static IP dialup.

I went off to college two years later and my life moved on in different directions, and after a while the company said the Indigo needed to be returned for salvage, so my mom dropped it off. The last time I got to use an SGI was about 20 years ago. Well, with one exception: When I started working in the OR in 2005, there was a system we used in for intraoperative brain navigation that had an SGI at its core. Funny enough, it was exactly the same kind of visualizations the geophysicists were doing, but with grey matter instead of rock layers. Of course, these were x86 systems, and those were replaced with off-the-shelf Linux boxes in vendor's next iteration a few years later.