[GeekLucanis]

My Octane was used to convert film to digital at some location in the south, and at a medical facility before that.
My previously own Challenge S was owned by Princeton U.
My current Indy and Presenter was owned by a prior SGI employee.

[josehill]

• Fuel that briefly ran Nekochan.net (sorry, no hidden trove of Nekochan archives)
  
• R3000 Indigo that served as an instrument controller and image analysis workstation for a confocal microscope at a well-known pharmaceutical firm
  
• R5000 Challenge S that ran the same firm's research intranet
  

[Trippynet]

My Indigo2 and Fuel were purchased from Ian, so I don't know their history. I imagine (given how many systems he processes) that he doesn't know exactly where each of them originated, although I could be wrong.

My O2, plus my earlier (and now sold) Indys were from the teaching labs at Teesside University. They were used to teach students Softimage and VRML amongst various other things and I acquired them cheaply as the Uni upgraded to newer PCs in those labs. To be honest, this is always why I lusted after an Indigo2 as the Indys/O2s were the student teaching machines, whereas Teesside Uni used Indigo2s (and later Octanes) by professionals for developing 3D models for their VR centre. I always wanted one of the more "professional" machines as a result...

[BackPlaner]

Fun reading, great thread!

[Noguri]

- My Onyx2 (rackmount) was once part of a Reality Monster owned by a Fraunhofer institute (but I can't recall which one) and used for fluid/thermodynamics simulation
- Got an Octane2 and an Indy owned by "Les Armateurs", a French animation studio. They were used for the cartoon "Kirikou et la sorcière", a belgian/french production. This movie was a hit in France and was later distributed in Japan by Studio Ghibli. One of the Octane2 HDD still contains footages from this movie but nothing too interesting unfortunately...
- Last is my Indigo2, owned long time back by Méteo France (French National Weather Service). I don't know precisely what it was used for...

[kaigan]

Onyx350 Prototype: No specific details, sadly, but likely to have been a demo/certification unit for a client. For whatever reason, it was never returned to SGI.

O2: Part of a university research lab in Florida.

Onyx2: Consists of components from two different desksides. Some components were used in feature film work in California, though I don't have the details. The others were part of a Merchant Marine training simulator designed to replicate the bridge of a ship.

Octanes: Also part of the Merchant Marine training simulator.

Those are the only ones I have details on. It'd be cool to know what they were all originally purchased for, though!

[uunix]

I purchased many years back my Octane 2x600 from a couple in London. It was and still is pretty well equipped. It was a good story, and I paid £50 for it. It was a discreet system and worked at Eastwood Studios in London. The owners were sick of hauling it from home to home and they had obtained it from the wife's mothers who worked there and upon being mad redundant was told to "take your computer home if you want.." I tell you what.. that thing is heavy as buggary!

I said at the time to them, "This is worth much more".. the wanted shot of it and I gave them an extra £10 for a Chinese take-away..

Of all the machines I have, that's the only SGI that has history.. but I do have an IBM power that came from an interesting place.

---

Oh I forget myself.. I had an SW320 from a company that were producing a spiderman cartoon.. I've still got the animation somewhere, but to be honest it was the 1980s porn that the user had save was more interesting.

[jan-jaap]

• 4D/70 GT: Came from Motek Entertainment
  
• 4D/380 VGX ("Dali"): Came from a Fraunhofer Institute.
  
• 4D/440 VGX: Came from FGAN Forschungsgesellschaft (now a Fraunhofer Institute). No idea what they did with it, but interestingly I got a thick binder with all documentation of the sale (the quotations, the haggling and the invoice, field service reports etc etc). Quite revealing
  
• Onyx RE2: Came from SARA. [sold].
  
• 4D/35, Indigo2 R10K: Came from Spekan Engineering. Used to run Pro/Engineer
  
• An Indy: Donated by AKZO Nobel to my first company to support our product on MIPS/IRIX
  
• Indigo R3000: Originally owned by Maarten Toonder animation studios, used to create the Olivier B. Bommel films.
  
• Indigo R4400: Came from some NASA facility. I'd have to look in my archives to know which.
  
• Onyx2: came from a "VR truck driving school" simulator setup in Utrecht.
  
• Some more Onyx2's from the German Pro-7 TV channel. Had tons of Bundesliga material on them.
  
• My Tezro is an original Discreet setup, but I don't know the original Dutch owner.
  
• I have a Fuel prototype, donated by SGI as a development platform for a project, orphaned after SGI went tits up twice and finally came home to me when my company cleaned up.
  

[Raion]

I remember you had a thread on that a while ago but I don't think it made it in the archives. Maybe you should do an updated thread.

[indigofan]

My Indigo2 High Impact was used by me at the premier modem manufacturing company back in the day for 3D modeling using PowerAnimator for corporate animations.
My two Indys R5K's were also used at said company, I ran fullscreen 30fps videos on them that I created for our seminars and roadshows around the country. When I quit they let me take all the gear. Wish they would of given me the other Indigos that were used by the design team building out hardware cases in PRO/E, when they switched over to Windblows. ;(

Another 2 Indy R5K's that were given to me for free was used at Berkeley Systems, it had SoftImage 3.9.2 on it and that's how the Flying Toaster screen saver was made, and all the other screen savers that they created.

The fully loaded O2 that was given to me by SGI for payment (when they started to go bust...) was used to create some demos for their HQ in Mountain View, CA leveraging MediaBase and some custom stuff that I built to showcase on-demand video for use in the education vertical and corporations. The demo ran right next to Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shendoah project that he worked on. Got to meet him at a party at SGI HQ. Very nice guy. They also gave me unlimited schwag, most of which I donated to a homeless shelter in San Jose, CA.

I had kept in touch back in the day with some folks that worked at Harley Davidson that SGI introduced me to, one wanted to gift me one of their boxes when they switched platforms, the other half said no, as I had at least 8-10 machines at the time and a few NeXT Cubes. There was nothing more fun then going golfing (I mean drinking) with the Harley guys. I really wish that I had more space to store all the stuff back then.